Fatal Refuge: a Mystery/Thriller (The Arizona Thriller Trilogy Book 2)

by Sharon Sterling

  She looks around to see who might be watching. She sees no one but knows they are there. She walks barefoot a few yards away and finds a spot to hide among the jojoba bushes. She digs a small hole with a stick, and urinates into it. Back at the truck she hauls out her water jar, washes her hands and face, then brushes her teeth, careful to let all the waste water fall onto a flowering weed where it will do some good.

  It has been ten days since she decided not to go to the clinic for her monthly shot of mind-control. She feels quicker and clearer already and that endless craving to eat and eat is gone. Invisible anchors on her body and mind are lifting and yet the residue of fear from being attacked torments her. Every day she re-lives the day a stranger tried to kill her. She will not drive by the place it happened or go near the restaurant where he works. And the reason Judy Squires, the girl who claimed to be her case manager, denied his name and where he worked is unanswered. The girl even denied he tried to kill her! She must be part of the conspiracy, one of the war-lovers.

  When she left the tiny apartment the Clinic had provided she took almost nothing except the clothes on her back and the cell phone the Clinic people had given her, “for emergencies,” they said. The phone has been buzzing many times a day, every day until the last two. Allie and the others at the Clinic are the only ones who know the number. They are calling to tempt her back, back into the fold where she doesn’t belong. She could turn the phone off or take out the battery or even throw it away but she hasn’t done that. The sound is annoying but it holds some trace of reassurance. Some of them meant well. Soon the battery will die and she will be left with her thoughts only.

  She settles into the driver’s seat and munches an apple for breakfast. She is free again, herself again, free to choose where to go and what to do. The Yumans have proven to her that they are not deserving of salvation; she has searched and searched but the nine hundred righteous do not exist here. In this place her daughter was murdered and she herself was nearly murdered. Let them deal with their mortal danger by themselves. Let them try to prevent the coming apocalypse in this very evil and dangerous world.

  Thus ruminating, she waits to learn what she will do and where she will go next. Soon words come to her, words of a poem written long ago about her home in Oklahoma. They sing in her mind:

  I may return again someday

  to these rolling hills where miles reveal me. . .

  “No!” The voice is both familiar and commanding. The rest of the poem escapes her. “Michael?” She looks around and sees no one. “Michael?” Chills creep up her spine and she shakes them off. She waits but hears only sounds of the natural world. Suddenly she feels strangely lonely as well as a little frightened, emotions she detests. Quickly, she begins to tidy herself by combing her hair and then tidies the truck. Yesterday she bought a full tank of gas; today she will have the oil changed.

  The phone in her pocket rings. For some reason, instead of ignoring it again, she looks at the caller I.D. Kim Altaha. Yes, the Indian girl. Impulsively she answers.

  “Sara! Thank you for picking up! We’ve all been so worried about you.”

  “Nothing to worry about, Kim. I been taking care of myself since I was twelve. Anyway, what are you doing up at this hour? Going to work?”

  “Yes, later. But I woke up this morning thinking about something besides work. Sara, you know that Allie and Dr. Sirota and Judy Squires all want you to come back?”

  The voice comes again. It is Michael’s familiar, deep baritone, “No.”

  “No,” Sara says and it’s not as if she is repeating, it’s as if the first “no” is her own.

  She hears Kim’s sigh. “I didn’t think you’d come back. Alright, but I need to tell you something. Sara, I’ve been wondering how much farther your truck can go and what you would do if it gives out in the middle of the desert. I don’t want to scare you about that, but I’ve been thinking that I need to buy a new Jeep. I want you to have the one I’m driving now. It’s got only fifty-five thousand miles on it and it’s in good repair. I’d feel better knowing you were driving something safe.”

  To Sara the idea is so unexpected it sounds unreal; she can’t quite process such a generous offer. Her mind goes blank.

  Michael’s voice, “No! It’s a trick, you stupid woman.”

  “Well, I. . .let me think. . .”

  His voice is loud, with a knife-like edge. “They don’t want to help you. They want to pen you up again and control you. Say no!”

  “No, I can’t,” Sara says into the phone. She struggles to get the next words out. “Thank you anyway, Kim.” With trembling fingers she keys off the phone and drops it at her feet. She takes a deep breath, and waits for her companion.

  When he comes into sight, he is walking fast, talking harshly, not as she remembers him at all. “Old woman! Why did you get involved with them? What did it get you? A bed to sleep in and a telephone. Then they sent someone to murder you! Throw the phone away or I will.” Without waiting he picks it up and throws it far down toward the river.

  “Michael, please don’t be angry with me.” She is trembling, but somehow it’s alright, somehow there is security and familiarity along with the fear. With Archangel Michael to help her she will be safe. He is her protector, her gift from God.

  He speaks again. “Now get in the truck and shake the dust of this place from your feet, foolish woman.”

  West, the thought comes to her and she knows why. Court-ordered by the State of Arizona to receive mental health treatment in Arizona, the Clinic can actually send the police or sheriff’s deputies to bring her back to the inpatient unit, back to mind-control medication, back to that tiny trap they called an apartment. But in California, or even north in Utah, they have no power over her at all. Michael likes that. She does as she is told. She walks to the truck and gets in.

  • • •

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Kim spent the rest of the day making sure her uniforms were clean and pressed, getting ready to go back to work. After dinner Lon stowed two backpacks filled with water and supplies in Kim’s Jeep, and put Zayd in the back seat. They drove with the windows down, enjoying the recent blessing of cool nights, saying little. When they parked at the trail head Kim said, “You and Zayd stay here, please.”

  Lon’s face hardened and she knew he was about to protest. She said, “You can stay here and wait for me or you can go home and come back. I have my smart phone and there’s reception from down here. I’ll call when I’m ready.”

  “We’ll wait.”

  She set out carrying a powerful flashlight and a bottle of water. She didn’t need to turn on the flashlight and forgot she carried water. She reached the site without knowing what she would find or what she would do there. The first thing she saw was the little white cross Cindy’s mother had set up. It lay fractured on the ground, nothing left of the mass of purple flowers Sara had placed there. The woman’s anguished and remorseful words echoed in Kim’s mind. She stood quietly. A shudder shook her body. The site felt as grisly and damaged as it had the day she found Cindy’s body lying there, face down in the dirt. The wrongness of it came to her again, echoing the emptiness inside her. The spirit of the place was wrong.

  And her spirit? Guilty and angry. She had felt remorse at seeing Cindy’s body, a dead woman in the wilderness, shades of her tribe’s recent history of warfare, part of that racial guilt she had claimed for herself and mingled with personal guilt from her own past errors. And she had felt anger, anger at the White man whose invasion of this land had set it all in motion.

  She unlaced and removed her sneakers and socks, pulled the scarf from her pony-tail and climbed atop the boulder. She stood and turned slowly, looking up into the pale blue sky, at stars winking on as the sun began to set. The play of colors on the western horizon held her for long moments as they swelled from pink and yellow to crimson and gold, then faded to grey as the sun slipped away.

  Twilight, the time when the earth pauses. She looked dow
n at the high desert landscape and saw no movements. The heat and intense activity of day was over but the dark, predatory energies of night had not yet emerged. The evening breeze stirred away the last of late summer’s warmth. The rock beneath her bare feet had been hot. Now it felt cool. She looked up again, at bats and nighthawks soaring, at the stars in the great vault of the darkening sky, and felt small. Then she looked down at the earth, at rocks and pebbles, cacti and ground insects, and felt large.

  An early September full moon rose in majesty from behind the mountains. She let its light bathe her face. She thought of Sara’s ceremony of farewell to her daughter and felt some comfort, as Sara had. She remembered her resolve to help find Cindy’s killer and she and Verbale had found each other, the fated joining of intended victim with killer. But fate had turned killer into the recipient of justice; the trail of evils Verbale perpetrated became the hell-fire that swept back and consumed him.

  She looked at the desert floor, softened by the glow of the eternal moon. Yes, the earth’s soil could be dirtied by blood and the moon’s dust could be sullied by man’s footsteps; but the spirits of earth and moon could not be desecrated by man, no matter man’s heedlessness and cruelty.

  She closed her eyes. After many minutes a vision sprang up. In her vision she has found her soul tree! She makes a small fire nearby and begins to dance around her soul’s twin in the form of a tree. She dances in celebration but suddenly the fire sends sparks to ignite her soul tree. In her vision it becomes a torch, a funeral pyre, her twin soul extinguished. She feels the fire inside herself. It burns away anger and guilt inside her, both inherited and self-inflicted. As it consumes it purifies, leaving freedom and possibilities.

  Then the vision was gone. She opened her eyes. She remembered what Lon had said to her, here in the Kofa. He told her that first responders were either lovers of life or lovers of death. The knowledge entered her, with perfect clarity and perfect certainty, that she was a lover of life.

  As night settled in, peace inhabited the cells of her body. Her eyes accustomed to the dark. She saw nightlife: scorpions crawling on rocks, pack rats, bats and nighthawks. She saw coyotes loping about their business but they didn’t see her, a watcher transfixed by the watched.

  A cloud passed over the moon. More clouds built, far away to the southwest. Then lightening, at first with no sound, just distant flashes from sky to ground and from cloud to cloud, a sense of moisture and tension growing in the air. She watched as clouds moved closer, concealing the moon, absorbing its light. The crash and roar of thunder came closer, deafening. Bolts of lightning flashed a split second behind the roar. She stood, absorbing sound and light. A few drops of rain fell on her face followed by a pelting torrent; and still she stood.

  Soon she was soaked to the skin, hair wet, shirt and shorts dripping. Gradually the flash and noise of the thunderstorm faded away. Rain water, too, drained away, moisture evaporated and absorbed by thirsty desert air and earth.

  Something was happening inside her, something leaving her, something filling her, and it was good.

  Mingling into the soft murmur of desert nightlife a drum beat sounded in her ears, the drum beat of a Native Sun-Dance she had attended years before. She listened intently. She heard it, felt it, absorbed it and then became one with it. In her body the vibrations were subtle but defined, “boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom.” She jumped down from the rock. Slowly she began to dance, toe-heel, toe-heel, moving and swaying, turning and circling in a dance of redemption.

  ###

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  Interested in the characters, Allie and Kim? Read their back-story in The Well.

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