BLACK TO DUST
Quentin Black Mystery #7
by
JC Andrijeski
Copyright © 2018 by JC Andrijeski
Published by White Sun Press
Cover Art & Design by Damonza
http://damonza.com
2018
Ebook Edition, License Notes
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SYNOPSIS of BLACK TO DUST
“It’s good,” he pronounced. “We need one like you. You need a ghost to fight a dead man.”
Black finds himself out in the New Mexico desert, where an old war buddy of his needs his help with a rash of murders plaguing his small reservation town.
At first it appears to be a pretty cut and dried case of supernatural infestation.
When it turns out that infestation is being orchestrated by a banished and fanatical shaman, however, things start to get weird fast.
Black, who only went out there to forget his marriage problems and distract himself with some good, honest work, soon finds himself face to face with his worst fears from his past.
He needs Miri out there to help him, but when he finally convinces her to come, things only spiral even faster out of control, drawing them into an ancient, apocalyptic force that might tear them apart forever.
*
BLACK TO DUST is book seven in the QUENTIN BLACK MYSTERY series, a paranormal mystery series starring brilliant but dangerous psychic detective, Quentin Black, and his partner, forensic psychologist Miri Fox. It’s also a spinoff of the BRIDGE & SWORD SERIES.
1
DRY HEAT
“I DON’T KNOW where the fuck I am right now,” he confessed, looking up and down the endless-seeming stretch of dirt road. “You sure Dex got the grid coordinates right? Because there is nothing––and I do mean nothing, sweetheart––within a hundred clicks of here.”
Black heard the woman on the other end of the line, Angel, his wife’s best friend, exhale in exasperation.
“Jesus, Black. You have every damned gadget under the sun at your disposal.” Her lightly-accented-with-a-touch-of-Louisiana voice turned into a grumble. “What are you even calling me from? A military-grade sat-phone? Now you’re gonna tell me you’re lost?”
Humor reached her words, as if involuntarily.
“Why’re you bitching about it to me, anyway?” she added, still grumbling. “Don’t you have satellites re-positioned for you on a whim, whenever you call your pals in the Pentagon? Call someone who gives a shit, Black.”
He grunted, wiping sweat off his neck and face with the shoulder part of his T-shirt. He squinted down the long, red-rock desert highway, looking for any sign of another car. All he saw were the blurry, rippled lines of a mirage caused by heat bleeding off the pavement.
He’d been out here long enough now, he felt like he was breathing more red dust than oxygen. Every inhale seemed to coat his lungs, to stick in his throat.
“I’m not sure the planet Mars is visible from GPS satellites, Ang,” he said, looking up and down the car-less stretch. “Just ask Dex for me, all right? Or hell, call Nick. He’s the one who set up this shit-show. Isn’t it his friend from Albuquerque F.B.I. who’s supposed to be meeting me out here? Or one of the reservation cops?”
“Both,” she said. “He used to be Albuquerque F.B.I. Nick says he moved to B.I.A., or maybe Navajo Nation police… one of those two. He’s working with the special crimes unit.”
Black nodded. He knew “B.I.A.” stood for Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Generally the B.I.A. worked on reservations that didn’t have their own police force. The Navajo Nation was huge though, and had their own cops. The whole thing was a big clusterfuck of jurisdictions though, whenever a native reservation was involved, so B.I.A., F.B.I., local and state police forces outside the reservation and sometimes even the military got involved, depending on the crime and where it occurred.
Still gazing up and down the road, he frowned, wiping his forehead with an arm.
“I already tried to reach the yokel fucks over here, in Tohatchi and Naschitti,” he grumbled. “They had no idea what I was talking about. They said to call the Navajo Nation police. If I’m in the wrong place, or this whole thing is off, I want to go back to the resort and jump in the pool before it gets dark.”
“Be sure and call them that, Black,” Angel grunted. “Yokel fucks. They’ll love that.”
“You know me, babe. Everyone loves me.”
Angel snorted a real laugh that time, and he smiled in spite of himself.
“And what’s with all the whining?” he said. “I pay you, don’t I? Didn’t I give you and Cowboy an all-expenses paid vacation to magical New Mexico? Am I interrupting your ‘me-time,’ or something?”
Thinking about his own words, he grunted, imagining the two of them lounging by the same pool he’d just been fantasizing about.
“…Or is Cowboy giving you shit because I’m monopolizing you for five whole fucking minutes?” he said. “Unending apologies if my attempts to keep from dying of dehydration in the middle of nowhere are cutting into your poolside experience with your new boyfriend.”
He could practically see the woman on the other end roll her eyes.
“Maybe I’m just tired of being your Miri-replacement, Black,” she grunted.
Black tensed. “What?”
She went on as if she hadn’t heard him.
“…It’s not like we don’t all know why you’re calling me every twenty minutes since she left. Just because you’re too much of a damned chicken to call your own wife, I should have to suffer? Call her, Black. Just call her. Or did she change her number on you again?”
Black’s jaw tightened the longer she talked.
By the time she finished, his back teeth hurt.
He fought to swallow it, to keep his emotions in check, to at least to keep them from reaching his voice, but the anger in his light only worsened. In the end, all he did was let the silence stretch a few beats longer than was comfortable.
“She’s on vacation,” he said. “A real one. I don’t want to bother her.”
Angel let out an expressive sigh.
“Bother her, Black,” she advised. “Seriously. You’re being ridiculous.”
“Seriously, Ang… Fuck off.”
Seemingly unfazed, she exhaled.
“Call her, you big baby. Better yet, get on a plane and go to her. Stop driving the rest of us crazy because you both act like oversexed teenagers with trauma issues when it comes to each other.” Her voice frowning, she added, “Look, I know she’s mad at you. I know you have shit to work out. I know what happened in New York was hard––”
“Angel. I’m not going to talk about this. It’s none of your goddamned––”
“––but hard or not, you’re both being freaking stupid at this point,” she said, exhaling pointedly. “Miri as much as you. But it’s obvious you can’t handle being separated from her, or not talking to her, so you should just call her. Weird wild goose chases out in the desert aren’t going to fix this, Black.”
Again, he could almost see her on a sun lounger by the pool, w
earing a turquoise bikini, a frosted margarita glass in her hand under her designer shades.
A pool he owned, come to think of it.
“…Cowboy thinks so, too,” she added.
Black heard a voice protest in the background, along with a disbelieving laugh.
“Hey! Don’t bring me into this, darlin’…”
Angel went on as if Cowboy hadn’t spoken.
“Just call her,” she said. “Seriously. This ‘time apart’ thing isn’t working, or helping. Her going off angry and you waiting here, pretending you’re cool with it while you take solo jobs in the middle of god knows where, refusing any backup… none of it is helping. You’re a damned celebrity now, Black. What if someone recognizes you out there?”
Looking around at the empty landscape, the lack of even a single car or truck, Black grunted. “Yeah, strangely, that’s not a big concern right now.”
“Well, it should be,” she retorted. “You must know you’re driving your staff friggin’ crazy, at least. You and Miri both are driving yourselves and each other and all the rest of us bananas.”
For a moment, he only stared unseeingly out over the red rock of the desert.
Then, without knowing he meant to, he found himself answering her.
“She made it pretty clear she didn’t want me along, Angel. When I offered the trip, I meant for both of us to go. She made it clear that wasn’t going to work for her…”
Trailing, he bit his tongue when he realized Angel had suckered him into talking about this.
He was talking about this, and he didn’t fucking want to. Not with her. Not with Dex or Nick. Not with anyone but Miri herself, and not until she wanted to.
Wiping his forehead in the heat, he clicked at Angel under his breath.
“Look. I just wanted someone to know where to look for the body, in case I don’t show up back in town. If I’m not back in Santa Fe in two days, you might want to send someone. In the meantime, enjoy a margarita for me. Cowboy, too. On my fucking dime.”
Before she could answer, he clicked the hang-up button on his phone, still muttering in annoyance under his breath.
He didn’t want to be annoyed.
He didn’t want to be thinking about this at all, and now he couldn’t help it.
The whole point of the trip out here was to not think about Miri. He only agreed to take the meeting in person because it was the middle of fucking nowhere, because no one out here really knew or cared who he was, because he wouldn’t have constant fucking reminders of his wife everywhere he turned, including in the semi-accusing faces of his staff.
Most of them had no idea why Miri left, or why she was so angry about New York.
Most of them knew nothing specific, since Black was positive Miri hadn’t told them.
Even so, from the looks on their faces, from the glimpses he got of their minds, they all assumed it was his fault. He’d caught more than one of them assuming he’d been unfaithful to her. Given how Miri interpreted what he’d done during that several months of operations and infiltration both before and while they were in New York City, the realization infuriated him.
Coming out here was supposed to be a break from all that.
It was also the exact opposite of everything he’d been doing lately, whether in New York or San Francisco. People out here likely wouldn’t recognize him, whatever Angel said, not unless they were late night talk show junkies, or really into playing the stock market.
More to the point, most people out here wouldn’t give a shit, even if they did recognize him. They wouldn’t care that his face had been in the papers for the past few weeks for being a rich New York douchebag. They definitely wouldn’t know anything about the fact that vampires tried to kill him, his wife, and a hell of a lot of other people in New York.
The Colonel was supposed to bury all of that.
Even the terrorism problems ended once Brick was taken into custody. The news still spun speculations here and there, mostly aimed at China, but the loudest voices screaming about imminent attacks had grown more subdued of late, too.
None of what really happened was supposed to hit any of the local, New York papers, much less the national or international ones.
Even so, the Colonel told Black he should probably keep a low profile for a while.
Black was doing that. This was about as low-profile as he could get while still being inside the continental United States.
He did miss his wife.
He missed his wife a fuck of a lot.
Realizing Angel might be right, that he might have been calling her more often because of it, didn’t exactly help his mood. But he really couldn’t call Miri right now.
Miri made that really damned clear.
She told him she needed space. She specifically told him not to call.
She said no phone calls, no cute presents, no jewelry, no drunk-dialed voicemail apologies, no singing telegrams, no flowers, no surprise visits, no going into her dreams or trying to talk to her via the Barrier, the psychic space seers shared… no grand gestures whatsoever.
She didn’t leave him a lot of wiggle room.
She didn’t leave him any damned wiggle room, not without him having to be a prick and go against her explicitly-stated wishes, which he was trying his damnedest not to do.
She said she’d talk to him again when she was ready to talk to him again.
She said when that day came, she would call him.
That had been over seven weeks ago.
So far, he hadn’t heard a word. He wouldn’t even know where she was, if his security team hadn’t been filling him in.
He wasn’t about to tell Angel that, though.
He didn’t want to admit to Angel how much he missed his wife, not when Miri hadn’t yet given him a real answer on when she expected to be coming home.
That was assuming she expected to be coming home at all––at least to him.
Exhaling in frustration and now a surge of anger he couldn’t quite push back, he rested his hands on his hips, gazing out over the desert.
The land stretching to the horizon on both sides was even more empty than the road. The only living thing he saw was a giant bird, black in the sky, winging in a lazy circle over something he couldn’t see on the desert floor.
Great. A vulture.
That was fucking reassuring.
He wiped his face with his T-shirt again, wishing he’d brought a hat, or a bandanna at least. Hell, a baseball cap would’ve been something. As it was, he felt like an ant under a magnifying glass, even though he grew up in weather hotter than this.
He’d spent most of his childhood in Southern Thailand.
Thailand heat was wet, though. It was close-to-the-equator heat.
Something about this ultra-dry land and sun was different. In some ways, it was less uncomfortable than the humidity he remembered growing up, but it also made him feel like his life was in danger if he stayed out here too long––like the air and sun conspired to leach every drop of water from his body.
He glanced back at the Jeep he’d rented to drive out here.
He hadn’t botched the coordinates. He knew he hadn’t––neither had Dex.
Even apart from the instruments, he could feel it. He was in the right place.
So where was this asshole?
He scanned the red-rock horizon a second time, then stared down the road itself. There was nothing, anywhere his eyes focused.
Nick set this meet up.
He’d recently returned to the Northern Precinct of the San Francisco Police Department, following his six month sabbatical working for Black in New York. Nick told him the guy had worked for the F.B.I. out here, mostly in homicide, mostly on Native American lands, but recently he’d switched to either the B.I.A. or Navajo Nation to be closer to family.
Nick seemed to think the guy was trustworthy, if wound a bit tight.
Nick also said the guy claimed to know an “old friend” of Black’s, someone who lived o
n the rez and was somehow involved with his investigation. The detective hadn’t given Nick the name of this old friend, which was odd. Instead, he wanted Black to came out to the rez in person before he got into details of the case.
Normally Black would have blown it off.
Given how weird, cagey and dodgy the whole thing was, he at least would have had his people find out exactly who was behind it and what they wanted.
In this case, however, he decided to just wing it.
And yeah, Angel was right. His security team hadn’t been thrilled when he announced he’d be coming out here alone.
Angel was right about something else.
Miri probably had a lot to do with him doing it anyway.
Contrary to Angel and his security team’s suspicions, however, Black wasn’t being suicidal, or even overly reckless. He figured he knew who the “old friend” was that Nick’s war buddy said was involved somehow in his case.
It had to be one of the guys he’d gotten out of that federal penitentiary in Louisiana.
Easton, Frank, Dog, Devin, and Joseph all hailed from this part of the world. All of them grew up on reservations, although Black wasn’t sure which ones precisely.
While he’d been stuck in that hell-hole in Louisiana, he’d aligned himself with the “chiefs,” mostly in an attempt to stay alive, and also because, through Miri, he thought he might actually be able to pull it off––unlike trying to pretend he was Mexican or black, both of which likely would’ve just gotten him put in the prison infirmary.
Given that his options were to try and use his wife’s parentage or align with a bunch of psychopathic white supremacists, the choice had been an easy one.
Of course, he still managed to get his ass kicked by white supremacists.
That wasn’t the chiefs’ fault though.
Black still had trouble thinking about Louisiana without grimacing. The whole thing––waking up in that fucking prison, being sight-collared, getting beat up by racist knuckle-draggers, being stuck in a human-run lab where they experimented on him––none of it had been scrubbed from his mind, not even by taking down the vampires responsible.
Black To Dust: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery (Quentin Black Mystery Book 7) Page 1
