Tribal Ways

by Alex Archer

  Annja got in and drove. She knew there was a danger that the GPS record from her phone would clearly show her route to the training center, not to mention her escape. So would the pings from the phone to the relay towers, if anybody bothered to check either. She knew every cell phone sold contained built-in spy and tracking devices for law enforcement. So she paused, regretfully, to delete the memory of her expensive third-generation phone, throw its shell in the Dumpster of one closed-for-the-night business in a not-well-trafficked part of Lawton, and the SIM card, stamped into pieces, in another. She didn’t dare use it again, nor allow it to record any more of her progress.

  Her real reason for not calling the police, and the biggest reason for not wanting to be tracked, was the sizzling and nasty suspicion that law enforcement in the region was itself infiltrated by the Dog Society. Part of it was hunch. Part of it was knowing more about how law enforcement actually worked than most members of the ever-trusting public.

  She was as sure that Lieutenant Tom Ten Bears was clean as she was that the sun would rise in the east in too few more hours. But it didn’t mean everybody else in Troop G was. And thanks to the war on terror, there was way too much interconnectivity between forces, departments and agencies for anything resembling real security. It could be someone connected with the Lawton cops, or the Comanche County Sheriff’s Department, or even the Feds who used the information she provided to set the death squads on her trail.

  It wouldn’t even take an actual traitor or a mole to betray her to torture and death, she realized. Tom and Johnny Ten Bears had both told her there were no secrets in Indian country. Especially when information was so widely disseminated, there was no telling who might brag, or blurt, or wonder aloud—or even make some kind of seemingly harmless comment on what he or she had done at work that day to the family. All it took was for someone to overhear and innocently tell the wrong other someone. And Annja would be dead.

  Forty-five minutes after leaving the mall parking lot she walked through the door of the Bad Medicine.

  “I need a place to hide out,” she told the curious Iron Horse People gathered there. “The Dogs are on my trail.”

  16

  “Lookit,” Billy White Bird said around a mouthful of cereal. “Johnny’s a TV star.”

  “With those looks he’s a natural,” Angel said. “Too bad we’re all likely to show up on screen right next to him. Especially you, with that jack-o’-lantern face of yours.”

  Under the circumstances Annja found it hard to feel more than an academic appreciation for the Iron Horses’ gallows humor. They sat in the living room of a club safe house, a sprawling ranch-style set off by itself down a country lane, well screened by trees and surrounding terrain. Evening light filtered in over the tops of heavy curtains.

  Shown to a room of her own by her hosts on arrival Annja had slept most of the day. She had awakened to find it had hit the proverbial fan.

  The TV switched from an image of a mug shot of the absent Johnny Ten Bears to a newswoman in a rain-slicker standing by a rain-swept gulley as technicians in coroner’s jackets hauled out a body bag from behind her.

  “The latest victims in today’s shocking wave of violence in the Lawton area, which has claimed at least six lives, with several more missing and feared dead, are two of our own—reporter Monica Stevenson and her cameraman, Rondé St. John. They were discovered in this gulley west of Lawton and south of Fort Sill just forty-five minutes ago. Both had their hands bound behind their backs by wire and both had been shot once in the back of the head. Their bodies also showed what a Comanche County Coroner’s Department spokesperson described as, ‘signs of torture.’”

  “Bad sign,” said Angel, who sat next to Annja on the couch with her legs drawn up beneath her. Annja hadn’t realized before how petite the Comanche biker woman was. She probably wasn’t even five feet tall; her leather jacket seemed to dwarf the rest of her.

  “Notes discovered on Ms. Stevenson’s computer reveal she headed out early this morning to meet with a confidential informant who has been aiding her in an ongoing investigation into a shadowy western Oklahoma Native American group calling itself the Iron Horse People Motorcycle Club. Authorities are blaming the club for the current violent crime wave. Special Agent in Charge Lamont Young of the Lawton office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has just announced that the Department of Homeland Security has named the motorcycle club a terrorist group. We switch now to a live press conference—”

  “Can we change the channel?” Billy White Bird asked. He sat in a reclining chair eating his cereal from an outsize mug. “I hate that dude.”

  Ricky, who sprawled on the floor with his back propped against the couch next to Angel, clicked the remote. On CNN some newsface was interviewing George Abell by video feed. The Horses hissed like angry cats.

  “Whoops,” Ricky said. “Let’s move on before somebody heaves a boot through the screen.” He turned to a cartoon channel.

  “Young was involved in the Waco massacre, you know,” Ricky said to Annja.

  Annja raised a brow. “He seems young for that.”

  “It’s that smooth baby face of his,” Billy White Bird said. “Easy to maintain when you don’t have a conscience.”

  “I think he’s aching for an opportunity to try again with the same tactics and get a better outcome,” Ricky said.

  “Why did you say the report about the bodies of those TV people was a bad sign?” Annja asked Angel. “Other than for them?”

  “Bad news for us,” Angel said. “It means the Bureau’s going for a shock-and-awe publicity blitz. They usually don’t release details like that, especially while they’re hauling the bodies to the meat wagon. It was a setup to naming us terrorists and Johnny as the FBI’s Most Wanted.”

  “You sound very authoritative,” Annja said.

  Angel shrugged. She looked acutely unhappy.

  “She used to work for the U.S. Attorneys’ Office,” Ricky said.

  “She was an up-and-coming young prosecutor,” Billy added with relish. “She’s older than she looks, too.”

  “What happened?” Annja asked.

  “I grew a conscience,” Angel said quietly. “Or it woke up. Whatever.”

  Ricky patted her thigh comfortingly. “Fortunately it didn’t start to age her, like a vampire in the sunlight or whatever.”

  Billy burped and set the empty bowl on a TV tray beside him. The three Iron Horses had been in the house when Annja emerged sleepily an hour before. They’d pointed her to a well-stocked kitchen, where she’d braced herself with a big slice of panfried ham, eggs and beans.

  She was forcing herself to take it easy. She’d driven herself hard for a long time—since weeks before flying back to land hip-deep in the horror that happened to Paul and his associates. She’d traveled long distances and delved deep into sorrow. She’d fought for her life and taken life and fled for her life. All of these things took tolls. On the body and on the soul.

  And who knows how long I’ll get to rest? she thought. So she curbed her restless nature, her impatient desire for action.

  There’ll be action enough soon, she reminded herself. More than enough for a normal person’s entire lifetime.

  “So, Billy,” she said, recognizing a need to be distracted, “feel free to tell me this is too personal—but what on earth is that tattoo on your stomach, anyway?”

  Angel barked a foxlike laugh, then covered her mouth shyly. “Sorry,” she said. “But would he go around without a shirt on all the time if he didn’t want people asking about that tat?”

  “Hey,” Billy said, sounding aggrieved but grinning as he pulled up his stained white T-shirt. “I’m wearing something today.”

  “Just be glad he didn’t compensate by leaving his pants off,” Ricky said.

  Annja leaned forward to peer at the artwork etched on the broad canvas of Billy’s belly. She saw it was a beautiful, remarkably intricate work in blue ink, after the fashion of a nineteenth-century
newspaper lithograph. It displayed what she took for a Comanche warrior riding his pony away from a small party of U.S. Army cavalry who, from their bearing, she guessed were a general and his staff. The warrior was showing them his bare backside and slapping it for emphasis.

  “That’s, um, remarkable,” she said. “How long have you had it?”

  “Since I was a kid. All these years I still kept my svelte shape, you see.” He slapped his belly, which jiggled.

  Annja cocked a brow. “And you served in the military?”

  “Oh, yeah. Where I learned my trade.”

  “What did they say when they saw that tattoo at boot camp?”

  “‘Semper fi, Marine.’” He braced in his chair and snapped off a perfect salute.

  She stared at him a moment, then laughed out loud.

  “I served in Iraq, round one,” Billy said, leaning forward to settle his beefy elbows on the table.

  “He’s older than he looks,” a voice said from the side. Annja turned to see Johnny Ten Bears, wet hair hanging over the shoulders of his colors, grinning at her from the door to the kitchen. “Not to mention worse.”

  “Much worse,” Billy agreed.

  “Have you been here all this time?” Annja demanded.

  “Heck, no,” Johnny said. “Just came in the back.”

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  “Good. Injun warriors specialize in sneaking up on unsuspecting white-eyes. I’d have to hand back my Boy Scout merit badge in redskin perfidy if I couldn’t pull it off.”

  “I knew Johnny’s daddy, even,” Billy said, clearly feeling expansive. “We served in the same Marine Expeditionary Unit. Then again, us Numunu boys always tended to stick together. Kiowai too. All us Injuns did.”

  He made a face that made him resemble a jack-o’-lantern more than usual. “’Course, old Tom and I come to some pretty opposite conclusions about what a good idea that whole war was.”

  “He has a habit of coming down on the wrong side of every fence,” Johnny said, not smiling anymore. “When he gets off it, that is.”

  That killed the conversation for a moment. Sorry, Billy mouthed to Annja.

  “Where’ve you been?” she asked Johnny.

  Johnny came and sat unselfconsciously on the floor near Annja. “Walking up and down in the world, and going back and forth in it,” he said.

  “Old joke,” she said.

  “For you, maybe, Ms. Renaissance Scholar.”

  “He was probably hiding your rental car somewhere and getting rid of that Magnum you brought back,” Ricky said.

  “That’s right,” Johnny said.

  “You came in last night?”

  “You were snoring like a chainsaw,” Billy said. “It was downright cute.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  “So was that horse pistol hot?” Billy asked Annja.

  “Radioactive,” she said. “Probably.”

  She hadn’t wanted to dump it anywhere herself after her escape from the training center slaughter; the chance of discovery was too great. Whereas the Iron Horses had, as she assumed, ways. As indeed it seemed they had.

  “You want to know what I did with it?” Johnny asked.

  “No. But how about my car?”

  “Stashed in a garage in town, in case somebody tracks it. When you need it we can get it back.”

  “So what are your plans from here, Ms. Creed?” Johnny asked.

  “Good question,” she said. “I’m still determined to track the skinwalker killer and stop him. I haven’t forgotten that even if everybody else has. Also—”

  She hesitated. Will I sound too presumptuous? Then she thought, Screw it. My whole life’s presumptuous.

  “I want to clear your names,” she said. “You were right about the Dog Society—all of it.”

  She had told them what she had seen the night before. “And I was wrong. I don’t want to see you suffer for their crimes—past, present or future.

  “Don’t forget I enjoy pride of place on the Dog Society’s hit list,” she said. “I’m the witness who can nail their coffin shut. And they were after me even before I got caught like a complete fool spying on their little terror con fab.”

  “So why didn’t you go to the authorities, Annja?” Johnny asked.

  “As in Special Agent in Charge Young?” she said. “Or as in your father?”

  “Either one.” His gaze and voice were flat.

  “You think this is the first time I’ve lived by the maxim ‘if you don’t dare call the cops, call the outlaws’?” she asked. “Anyway, isn’t that a funny question for an outlaw biker to ask? Especially one who just hit number one on the FBI’s Most Wanted list?”

  “Not so much, Annja,” Angel said earnestly. “I think what we’re all wondering is why you made that choice,” Angel said. “It’s not the same as advocating it ourselves, right?”

  Annja reminded herself that what looked like a sweet high-school girl playing at running with the pack was a woman who was probably older than she was, and an attorney to boot. “All right,” she said, “fair enough. I don’t trust law enforcement.”

  Johnny frowned. “Consider the blatantly obvious question asked.”

  “I trust your father,” she told him. “That doesn’t mean I trust everybody around him. There’re too many ears in that Department of Public Safety office. Not just his fellow officers. Dispatchers. Clerks. People from other divisions walking by the door. The UPS dude. They don’t even have to be moles themselves. All they have to do is tell the wrong friend or family member something exciting they heard. Or even say it in front of the wrong random person.”

  Billy turned his somewhat scary grin on his chief. “She’s a smart one, Johnny. Admit it.”

  “When did I deny it?” He sounded more grumpy than growly.

  “Plus,” Annja said, her conscious mind suddenly dredging one of the subconscious warnings that had stopped her last night to the surface, “the Feds are almost certainly monitoring his cell phone.”

  “You do realize that would be illegal, Annja?” Angel said.

  “That doesn’t mean they’re not doing it—right?”

  “Right.” Angel shrugged. “Another reason I quit.”

  “So what do you plan?” Johnny asked, standing and stretching.

  Annja shook her head. “I don’t know yet. Hang with you guys if you’ll let me. Use this as a base. And—”

  She drew in a deep breath and sighed it out. “Wait for some kind of opportunity.”

  Johnny looked to his comrades.

  “I like her, Johnny,” Angel said.

  “Fine with me,” Ricky said.

  “I think she’s a keeper,” Billy said.

  “What about the rest of the club?” Annja couldn’t help asking.

  “They’re not here,” Johnny said. “Okay. Make yourself at home.”

  “Do you have a better plan? Anybody? I’m asking that seriously,” Annja asked.

  Johnny shook his head. Then he flashed his dazzling grin. “But opportunity’ll break somewhere,” he said. “It always does.”

  Annja might have made some flip, ironic comeback. But she wasn’t that person.

  She believed opportunity always broke, too. Somewhere.

  I just hope it breaks in time, she told herself, before there’s a lot more heartache.

  She had to admit she didn’t like the odds.

  17

  “So what we got here,” Lieutenant Tom Ten Bears said, “is what we call in law enforcement, technically, a big ol’ mess.”

  Actually, Annja was willing to bet they called it something much worse, but she wasn’t about to contradict him.

  They stood together next to the grid marked out by the OU archaeological dig team. The sticks leaned. The twine boundaries sagged forlornly. The wind plucked them like flaccid violin strings, eliciting no music Annja could hear.

  “And we’re right in the middle of it,” she said.

  “That surely is the case. Where’ve
you been hiding from me, Ms. Creed?”

  “If I told you it wouldn’t be hiding,” she said. “Am I in trouble? Have I gotten you in trouble?”

  “‘Not yet’ to both.” He chuckled deep in his throat. “That was a cute trick to set up this meet. Why go all around Kicking Bird’s barn to do it, though?”

  She had called his cell from a pay phone. She told him to go to where they first met and ask about her. At the ICU of the Norman medical center they had given him a handwritten note. It read simply, “Dig site.”

  “I don’t want to be arrested,” she said. “Much less die.”

  “You don’t trust the authorities?” His voice had taken on an edge like the spring wind.

  She turned to face him. “No,” she said. “You told me yourself—nothing happens in Indian country that doesn’t get seen.”

  He stared at her for a moment. Then, slowly, he nodded. “I see what you mean.”

  “It doesn’t necessarily mean a traitor,” she added.

  He turned away and sighed a puff of condensation. “But it’s possible. Likely, even, now that I think about it.”

  “Then there’s the Feds,” she said. “I didn’t want to risk them listening to your calls.”

  He turned back. “You really think they’d—whoa. No need to finish that, is there?”

  He walked a few steps away from her. “I’m a patriot, Ms. Creed,” he said. “Any true Indian is. Think about it. The American white-eyes beat us. That must make them the best there is, huh? So theirs is an honorable path to follow.”

  He shook his head. “And it’s a good country. The bad things that were done a long time ago—they were plenty bad. They’re also long past. In the end your people treated mine better than a lot of conquered peoples have gotten. And we’re accepted—mostly.”

  “Yes,” she said. She wasn’t sure where he was going.

  “I’ve fought for this country,” he said. “Not just in Iraq. And I still believe in it. But—”