by Alex Archer
“I’ll try to stay away from him.”
“You be sure to do that. Let us professionals handle him. We do a bad enough job without any help.”
She wasn’t sure quite how to take that. He seemed like a man who, for all his cockeyed banter, took his job very seriously. She also didn’t think his tongue was more than halfway in his cheek, and wondered just who wasn’t doing their job quite so well.
She also knew better than to ask. Lieutenant Ten Bears clearly thought of himself as a stand-up cop. He’d never bad-mouth a fellow officer to an outsider. But he might not be above dropping some sidewise comments about his comrades who didn’t measure up.
“One more thing before you go,” he told her as she started for the door of his small office. “We got us some young South Plains braves here in western Oklahoma who don’t much like white-eyes. And they play rough. Tempers are extrashort right now since some of them don’t like it that we got us a great big new casino the Nation’s opening up in a few days.”
He laughed at her expression. “Don’t worry,” he said. “They can’t fire me for calling them braves. Any more than they can make us Indians call ourselves Native Americans. That fight we won, anyway. Maybe it’s a trend.”
Annja had to laugh. She found herself liking the lieutenant.
As she left she thought, I don’t believe in werewolves. But there are plenty of things I don’t believe in that have a nasty habit of turning up, anyway.
3
The site was a bust.
The sun was setting when Annja got there. The only people present in the mellow dusk light slanting beneath gray clouds were some gloved techs moving gingerly around inside the yellow-tape perimeter whipped constantly by the wind, and a pair of Comanche County deputies in cowboy hats. Both were lean young men, one with hair cut so painfully short it suggested a recent military discharge, the other with gleaming black braids hanging over the dark brown shoulders of his jacket. They both gave her a rock-hard look.
She told the deputies Lieutenant Ten Bears had sent her. Having seen more than her share of interdepartmental rivalry in law enforcement she wasn’t sure how they’d respond. But they both instantly broke into smiles. When she showed them her ID they readily allowed her access.
“I’ve seen you on TV, Ms. Creed,” the braided deputy said. He looked marginally older than his partner, and was clearly senior. “I know you’ll be careful. Not like some people we’ve had out here. And on a totally unrelated subject, the FBI just left.” He frowned. “I reckon we’re mainly out here to keep them federal boys takin’ over altogether.”
“I was surprised they didn’t offer to tip us on the way out,” his partner said. He reminded her slightly of the young man in the pictures on Ten Bears’ desk, only not so handsome.
Annja nodded, keeping her expression neutral. Like most local law-enforcement types, their regard for the self-billed world’s leading investigative agency tended to vary proportionally to their firsthand experience with them.
For her part Annja tried to keep on good terms with people. Especially the ones with guns and implied or explicit permission to use them.
She smiled and nodded in response to the deputies’ conversation, which wasn’t hard since they seemed to be pleasant and earnest young men. She was surprised and flattered when the junior deputy asked shyly for her autograph. He seemed way too impressed when she signed his notebook with a little note of thanks for his help.
Inside the tape the techs nodded brusquely toward her and went about their business. They kept studiously clear of the dig itself, marked off and gridded by string stretched between stakes. If she wasn’t supposed to be there, they clearly reasoned, the county boys would never have let her step over the tape. The evidence team had jobs to do and not much daylight left to do them. She guessed nobody wanted to be out there with a generator going and stand lights shining as the temperature dropped and the prairie wind came up.
She walked around with her arms crossed in front of her. The wind was indeed picking up as the sun fell toward the rumpled horizon in the west.
The geographic region lay in the Red Beds Plains, which ran all the way from Kansas down across the Red River into Texas. Unlike the true Great Plains farther north, this land was wide but rolling, dotted with small stands of trees. There weren’t any signs of cultivation in view. This particular part of the Red Beds was walled off to the north by the rough granite ramparts, built on a foundation of Cambrian sandstone beds, of the Wichita Mountains. Annja’s maps showed none of them got as high as twenty-five hundred feet, and the general elevation of the landscape was around a thousand. To Annja they were really just rugged hills by the standards of the ranges not far to the west in New Mexico and Colorado. Much less the Andes and the Himalayas, which she also knew firsthand. But the locals seemed adamant about their “mountain” status, so she felt disinclined to argue.
There really wasn’t much to see but some nasty dark splashes, now pretty dried out, on the short grass and the rocks. Where it was bare the red soil had sucked the blood down without much trace she could see, although the techs were taking samples and the spots where blood spatter had been found were marked with little plastic tabs. As were the places where the bodies had been found.
The dig team had been housed in a small RV, a trailer and a small camper pickup. If there was any sign the attacker had entered any of them Annja hadn’t been told. She decided to keep clear of them. She wasn’t looking for criminal evidence, and part of being a trained professional at site preservation meant minimizing the risk of messing anything up.
She searched for tactical evidence. How had the attack happened? How had the killer come so swiftly on the six people, whose attention, the transcript of Ten Bears’ interview with Paul indicated, had been innocently focused on coffee and doughnuts?
Some blurred tracks in the dirt suggested the killer had gotten close by using the trailer for concealment, before launching a blitz assault. If the tracks had given the investigators any clues as to the true nature of the monster—and whatever or whoever it was, there was no doubt it was a monster—they hadn’t shared them with her. She didn’t expect they would.
Following a few quiet words from Ten Bears the troopers at the Troop G HQ had also permitted Annja to see photos of the attack scene taken before the bodies were removed. They seemed surprised at how calmly she studied them.
They had affected her. But she was long past the point of breaking down from seeing butchery, no matter how horrific. Especially not mere images.
Now she tried to retrace the killer’s steps. He had worked incredibly fast, ripping or slashing open state archaeologist Dr. Watkins’s throat, then those of the two undergrads, Watts and Luttrell. Next it attacked Allison York, eviscerating her at a single blow.
All this occurred while Paul had his head turned, and apparently without his becoming aware of it. That was according to what he had told the trooper who rode with him in the helicopter when he was airlifted to Norman.
The killer then struck Paul. The landowner, Eric James, apparently tried to jump the killer when he was attacking Annja’s friend. The killer then knocked the Comanche man away, leaped on him and savaged him before turning back to further maul his other victims.
Even with the deadly advantages of surprise and shock, it had been a breathtakingly effective assault. Annja tried to envision what weapons the killer used. Did he carry knives, or wear Freddy Krueger-style knife gloves? Did he actually bite his victims? The highway patrol had declined to divulge to Annja any such particulars. She understood. She had no need to know, and those were the very kinds of things investigators always tried to hold back, on the theory that they could trap the killer, or authenticate any confession, on the basis that he knew details about the crime no one else had access to except detectives.
Also it spared the victims’ families reading about or, worse, seeing on TV too many titillatingly horrific details about their loved ones’ terrible last moments.
Having gotten what little she could from the murder scene Annja raised her face to the wind and looked around. The site was along an ancient dry streambed that ran from northwest to southeast. The trailer was parked on the north of the dig team’s camp, forming an upside-down U with the camper on the west side and the RV on the east. There was a pretty short line of approach to the humpback trailer from the natural cover provided by the northerly rise and some rocks and tall weeds.
The wind sighed and whispered, promising secrets it never delivered. Annja nodded politely to the evidence techs, then climbed carefully back over the flapping yellow tape and made her way up the little slope to the north.
She found another area marked off by yellow tape fluttering between plastic pickets. Tracks, blurred and indistinct. She realized they’d no doubt been broken down from having impressions taken.
She walked around, trying to survey with an attacker’s eye. It wasn’t an entirely unfamiliar operation to her.
The approach and setup to the attack had been dead easy. The dig camp had been sited with no remote notion that defense could conceivably be necessary in a normal, orderly, law-abiding universe. The victims had not bothered keeping a lookout. Not even their genial host, secure in the midst of his own domain—unlike his ancestors of a century before, who had found themselves chivvied constantly from one ever-shrinking sanctuary to the next. The fact he’d carried his own Marlin lever-action carbine in a saddle scabbard on his horse, which had bolted back to the barn after the attacker spooked it, suggested nothing of paranoia or even wariness to Annja. It was just a Western thing. He did it because he could, and because it came naturally to him.
She began to walk around the camp, periodically coming across more recovered tracks. Using the brushy, rocky terrain, the killer had circled around and around. Scoping his target. That part, at least, had been painfully simple.
He’d stalked them like a cougar hunting sheep. Waited, in the strange, almost submarine predawn light, until he was sure all his prey had come out of their shelters and clumped into a nice compact group. Then he’d slipped down to his final line of departure, crept to the rear of the trailer and attacked.
He’d probably rehearsed the whole event in his mind, crouching there by the trailer. Savored it like a hungry man’s anticipation of a juicy steak. Reveled in the sense of power—of knowing something those poor, hapless people didn’t know. They were about to die.
She shuddered. “You’re not a profiler,” she reminded herself in a soft voice.
But Annja had stalked human prey before. And killed. They were all violent men, sometimes women. Not victims but victimizers.
They were always wary, those whose lives she took. And always armed.
By contrast the wolfman was picking easy prey. Like any standard-issue serial killer who picked prostitutes to murder because they’d voluntarily get in the car with him.
And isn’t that what any successful predator does? she reminded herself. She shivered. Such moments of identification as this, with a being who epitomized the very evil she lived to fight against, chilled her worse than the rapidly cooling prairie wind.
She shook her head. A strand of her long chestnut hair had worked its way loose from her ponytail. The wind whipped it ticklingly across her face. The same wind teased her with little voices that hinted at meaning but never revealed it.
The western sky was changing from blood to mauve. The sun was long gone. It was time to emulate it. She went back to her rental car, waved to the deputies and drove away.
“DAMN!”
Annja slammed a palm on the steering wheel. The rented car’s motor was jerking and coughing. Jouncing along the no-name dirt track, severely rutted before even the spring rains came in earnest, wasn’t making the car any happier.
The day’s final remnants were a line of hot-iron-red glow along the western hills. Overhead the sky shaded from indigo to star-shot black. Some clouds, their bottoms showing just a faint yellowish glow of artifact light, were sweeping in from the east, piling up darkly as if to show bad intentions.
“Don’t do this to me,” she told the car. “I don’t want to hike up to the highway in freezing rain.”
The country was getting seriously hilly, preparatory to becoming the Wichitas. Highway 62, which ran from Lawton straight as a leveling laser west and formed the southern boundary of a spur of the military reservation that stuck out under the wildlife refuge, still lay, as closely as she could reckon, three miles north. And it was cold. Despite the heater she could feel the chill beating off the car windows like a negative furnace.
For the dozenth time she hauled out her phone. Still no bars. Her GPS was frozen.
Ahead to her considerable relief she saw artificial lights—a red-and-yellow oasis in a sea of dark. They weren’t bright lights, but then again this definitely wasn’t the big city. It wasn’t even the town of Cache, whose glow was faintly visible a few miles north, with its booming population of twenty-four hundred.
The flickering red neon sign read Bad Medicine Bar & Grill.
Below the battered sign stood a rectangular shack with a slanted tin roof, fronted by a wooden porch under a swaybacked roof of planks. The yellow light came through frosted front windows. The joint looked as if it had been built during the boom of interstate construction after World War II, possibly as an ersatz Indian trading post to attract the tourists. That struck Annja as optimism insane even by the standards of fifties-boom thinking.
As her rental lumped and bucked closer she saw there were no actual cars in the parking lot. There was a pickup truck and a minivan, not too unexpected in this part of the world, and another pickup hunched in the shadows out back. Dominating the dirt-and-gravel lot were at least a score of motorcycles shining in the light of the sign. The long low-slung beasts had heavily modified frames with burly V-twin engines. With pride of place in the middle of the pack sat the least visibly modified bike of the lot: a big Indian motorcycle with the trademark metal fairings over the tires. It looked to Annja’s none-too-expert eye like an original, not one of the never-too-successful attempts to revive the design, or at least the brand.
She went inside. She felt little trepidation. While a single woman had to tread warily in the borderlands, in the U.S. as well as everywhere in the world, she didn’t feel much concern. She had no problem with outlaw bikers, which in her experience had meant they had no trouble with her. She tended to take people on their own terms, and that seemed to work.
Of course, part of her intrinsic self-confidence sprang from the proven fact that if you did have a problem with Annja Creed, then you had a very bad problem, indeed.
The first things to hit her were heat and the slam of heavy-metal music blasting from a jukebox. Annja pushed on inside and let the door swing closed behind her.
After the darkness of the Plains night the bar’s dimly lit interior was still pretty dim. She paused just inside the door a moment to get her bearings. As the place resolved out of gloom she noticed it followed through with the outside’s deliberately rustic look, with a wood ceiling and exposed rafters bolstered in placed by square columns so rough-cut they looked as if you’d get splinters if you brushed up on one. It had the usual split-backed vinyl barroom chairs, tables to match the architecture, a bar with a long fly-specked mirror behind it. Bare bulbs cast a faint yellowish glow from lamps hung from the ceiling. Most of the illumination seemed to emanate from the jukebox beside her, which pulsated with polychromatic lights. Glancing down she saw the floor was actual wood planks. With sawdust on it, no less, like the Old West saloon the joint was obviously trying hard to emulate.
Her mental tracking system had already located the bar’s occupants. A few bellied up to the bar on foot or rickety-looking wood stools; the rest clustered around tables, or kibitzed while a short, wide man with a black band
anna tied around his head lined up a shot on the pool table in the far corner. Everyone in view but the bartender was dressed in the standard dark-hued biker drag; she could tell that much at a flash impression. She realized the truck and van outside were probably support vehicles for the club. Any joking and talking had stopped when she entered.
Time to break the ice, she thought.
“That’s a nice Indian out front,” she said.
Then she stopped dead.
There were nothing but Indians inside the bar.
And they looked anything but nice.
4
Everyone was staring at Annja, with nothing resembling a smile or eye twinkle in sight. She was quite aware she may have just said the wrong thing.
It was the classic situation where any attempt at explanation could only make things worse.
“Right, then,” she said. “Sorry to intrude. My car broke down. My cell phone isn’t getting a signal.”
She held the offending object up by her face and waved it. “I’ll just borrow the phone, make a quick call and get out of your…way.”
She was deliberately playing typical airhead tourist, in hopes they’d think her an idiot too innocuous to be worth bothering with. Not a great plan. But no really great options jumped up to present themselves, either.
She stepped up to the bar, noting that the two burly men next to her had colors on the backs of their old-school bad-biker denim jackets that showed an Indian warrior bestriding an Indian motorcycle—it looked suspiciously like the bike parked out front—shooting a bow. The legend on the back of the nearer biker read Iron Horse People MC, Comanche Nation. The other was similar, but substituted Kiowa for Comanche.
The bartender was a white guy, skinny as an alley cat, with craggy features and wild white hair. He looked white, anyway. Annja knew of numerous people who’d been born into full membership of their respective tribes who looked no more native. His blue eyes were piercing and unwelcoming when they turned on Annja. He didn’t ask her pleasure.
