Tribal Ways

by Alex Archer

  And she folded her arms and turned away.

  As she hoped they would the two men at once became shocked and conciliatory.

  “Holy shit,” finally came from Johnny’s mouth.

  “It’s the family curse, son,” Tom muttered, shaking his head. “To be attracted to women stronger than us.”

  That made Annja frown. It also made her turn around and reengage. “Okay. Now shake hands.”

  Her tone of voice and her body language did not suggest that was a request. Nor did it leave much room for anything but meek compliance. She now felt like a lioness laying down the law to a pair of unruly cubs.

  The two men hesitated, then shook hands. Her brow furrowed warningly, but neither tried any hand-crushing games.

  “Now promise you’ll work together,” she said.

  They looked at her, then at each other. She waited, drawing in an ominous breath.

  “Screw this,” Tom Ten Bears said. “I may not be much of a dad, but I’m the elder, and it’s my place to do what needs to be done. So I’ll back down. I’m sorry, son. I’ll do anything necessary to get your sister back. I reckon you will, too. So, yeah. I’ll work with you, Johnny. Whatever needs done, we’ll do it.”

  Johnny nodded. “Yeah,” he said.

  “Say it,” Annja hissed.

  He laughed. “Yes, I’ll work with you—Dad. And Annja. You’re part of this, too.”

  “Of course,” she said. She rubbed her hands up over her face and back over her hair, which was starting to escape from the borrowed green bandanna she’d tied around it.

  “Now that everybody’s settled down, what’s next? Are you willing to play things by the book and let the authorities handle this, like good little citizens?”

  Johnny snorted.

  “Well, now,” Tom said, “that Special Agent Lamont couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heel. So I’m sayin’ that’s a no.”

  Annja raised a brow at him. “So there’s something you both can actually agree on, right?”

  Tom shrugged. “Since I’m suspended, anyway, I don’t reckon I have to play this by Oklahoma Department of Public Safety rules.”

  Johnny gaped at him. “You? Mr. Law-abiding White Man’s Indian talking about breaking the law?”

  “Well, you know, son,” Tom said, “it turns out—since my breakfast this morning is crow, with ashes for an appetizer—that you’re right. The right thing really isn’t always the legal thing.”

  A big grin split his face. “My bosses are afraid I’ll go looking for old-school frontier justice. Then they went and cut me loose. So what say we go deal out some, son?”

  Suddenly the two men were embracing. So fervently Annja was actually afraid they’d dislocate something. Then they broke apart, looking half sheepish and half defiant. As if maybe hearing a chorus of their past selves hooting at them.

  “Now,” Annja said, “speaking of breakfast—unless ashes and feathers are enough for Tom—can we go get something to eat? I’m starving.”

  24

  “So what’s our next move?” Annja said.

  “If the FBI finds out where Abell is holed up first he’ll get the bloodbath he desires,” Johnny said, sipping coffee. “And that’ll be it for Sallie.”

  He looked at his father as if expecting him to jump to the defense of his fellow law enforcers. Tom simply nodded.

  Johnny blew out a slow, frustrated breath through flared nostrils. “Problem is, I don’t know how to start. We’ve got no means of tracking these self-proclaimed Crazy Dogs Wishing to Die.”

  “What does that even mean, anyway?” Annja asked.

  “Another North Plains thing those boys picked up by way of the Cheyenne,” Tom said. “For a bunch who claims to stand for traditional Comanche values they sure borrow a lot that doesn’t come from the People. The Crazy Dogs Wishing to Die were an Absaroka thing—what white people used to call the Crows.”

  “They say it means sparrow hawk,” Johnny said.

  “You’re not even supposed to call them sparrow hawks, anymore,” Annja said. “The birds, I mean. They’re American kestrels now. Turns out they’re not even related to hawks. DNA analysis says they’re descended from parrots.”

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Johnny said.

  “Jesus Christ,” his father said. “Maybe the End of Days types have a point, after all. Parrots. I bet the Absaroka are pissed about that. Pardon my French.”

  Annja smiled over her coffee cup. “I’ve heard worse.”

  Tom shook his close-cropped head. “Anyway, the Crazy Dogs were a flavor of Contraries, the warrior society whose members did everything butt-foremost.”

  “Early Native American frat rats,” Johnny said. “With a murderous streak, granted.”

  “That’s dead-on appropriate for Fat Georgie Abell,” Tom said. “But the real Crazy Dogs were pretty serious dudes. They used to tether themselves to the ground and fight—and die—where they stood.”

  “You think Abell and his friends will live up to that?” Annja asked.

  “You worked with him,” Johnny said to Tom, with a touch of reproach.

  “Easy now,” Annja said.

  “I did because I had to,” Tom said. “The Department of Public Safety wanted us to play nice with them because they were a pet project of the council. Which meant George’s dad and all his rich cronies. Many of whose kids were SIU, and are now holed up somewhere with my daughter and a bunch of feathers stuck to their heads. They were all college-educated ding-dongs playing cops—now they’re college-educated ding-dongs playing Che Guevara.”

  He took another sip of coffee. “And like that spoiled rich-boy Ernesto Guevara, they got them a nasty streak. Basically they’re what you kids today would call ‘drama queens.’ So, yeah, I’m afraid they will carry through with it. Leastwise, until it’s way too late to change their minds. Special Agent in Charge Young and those trigger-happy FBI SWAT shooters of his won’t be eager to give them a chance to, if they ever catch up with ’em.”

  “So how can we find Sallie?” Annja asked. “Before the Feds do?”

  “I got a way,” Tom said with assurance.

  Johnny looked at his father in honest puzzlement. “But you’re on leave. The Staties will never share any kind of tracking info the FBI or NSA picks up on the Dogs with you.”

  Tom shook his hand. “You were a good soldier, son,” he said, “good enough you coulda even been a Marine. And I don’t doubt you’re good at whatever it really is you do now. You always had to be the best at anything you did. I reckon you thought that’d make me approve of you. Problem was, that wasn’t what I wanted. All along, I wanted you to be something you couldn’t ever be.”

  “What was that?” Johnny asked.

  “Obedient.”

  Tom held up a big, scarred hand as if to forestall argument. Annja could see the groove the wedding ring had worn into his stubby finger, even though she guessed he hadn’t worn it for years.

  “Look. I’m comin’ clean, here, son. ’Fessing up. I was the adult, and your mom was right. I didn’t act like one. I acted like a little spoiled child myself, holding my breath till I turned blue because my boy didn’t turn out exactly like I wanted him to be.

  “I know I’m rambling here, and we don’t have much time. But believe me, son. You’re good at anything you do, but you’ve never been a cop.”

  “Okay,” Johnny said, “granted. Your point?”

  “Abell was. A crappy half-assed one, maybe. But he was also tied into the whole Homeland Security thing. That was another reason the Nation went for his shiny new SIU, along with the fact he was Rich Ron Abell’s son. He was real good at sucking up to the Feds. Brought in tons of money and aid. And all that high-tech stuff the Feds love to use instead of their heads or their shoe soles. In place of actual police work, I mean.”

  “So you’re saying he knows all about electronic surveillance,” Annja said.

  “More’n any of us does. That’s a
flat fact. Boy got no sense, never had him a lick. But he’s not stupid—no way. Anything the FBI or even NSA can use to track him by, he ain’t doing. They already know that video of his was posted by somebody tapping into some random badly secured wireless network right here in downtown Albuquerque. War driving, they call that.”

  Annja slumped. “So we can’t track him.”

  “Didn’t say that,” Tom said. “Said the Feds can’t track him.”

  “All right,” Johnny said, exasperated. “How can we track them if they can’t?”

  “I thought you were the self-reliant, antigovernment type.”

  “Lieutenant…” Annja warned.

  “Okay, okay. Just having some fun. Only ’cause I know things are about to get deadly serious. Emphasis on deadly.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin and tossed it on his well-cleaned plate.

  “Feds can’t track these bad boys,” he said, “but old Injuns can.”

  THE MEN CAME and went from the large living room. Between massive dark roof beams, and the red Santillotiled floors strewn with rugs in bold stripes and jags, it had been turned into a war room for Tom Ten Bears’ Indian old-boy-network and their hunt for his kidnapped daughter. It smelled of wool and age and the piñon fire crackling enthusiastically away in the big fireplace.

  Annja sat to one side on a sofa that, like all the big ranch house’s furniture, seemed built to withstand a bomb blast. She watched, sipping coffee. It wasn’t that she was deliberately excluded—the elder Ten Bears always paid careful heed to anything she said. And Johnny, restless as a leopard in a zoo, wasn’t any more hooked-in than she was. They simply were not what their ever-congenial host characterized as old Indians.

  Their host was one. Santo Domingo Pueblo Indian Edgar Martínez was an amiable adobe brick of a man, with iron-colored hair wound into a short, thick queue.

  He wasn’t a cop. To Annja’s surprise, far from all members of the network Tom Ten Bears had summoned to his aid were current or former law enforcement. Martínez had spent decades traveling the world as a machinist and mechanical engineer working oil fields. Then he retired to a sizable spread he’d bought in the piñon hills north of Santa Rosa in eastern New Mexico along I-40. There he presided over several generations of descendants and a number of enterprises, from running rangy cattle out in the chaparral to repair and remanufacture of parts for heavy equipment.

  Martínez, Ten Bears father and son, and a half dozen assorted network members were poring over U.S. geological survey maps spread out on a low coffee table. Having worked dig sites across America, Annja knew those well. They covered an area ranging from the Rocky Mountains in the west through northeastern New Mexico, the Texas panhandle and western Oklahoma to Lawton, and from Interstate 40 north to southern Colorado.

  It was the second day since the triumph Annja and the Iron Horses had bought so dearly had been turned to ash by the mauling of Dr. Watson and Sallie’s kidnapping. A huge flat-screen TV fixed on one whitewashed wall showed one of the news channels, all of which were giving the hostage hunt in the American West constant play. The sound was muted. Every now and then someone glanced toward the TV to see if anything new might be breaking.

  “Oh, no, thank you,” Annja said when Martínez’s wife came bustling in with a tray of pastries steaming from the oven. Maria Martínez smiled, nodded and moved on. She was of all things a Norwegian. An anthropologist who specialized in Norse and Celtic cultural interpenetration during the Viking epoch, Maria was a stocky, pink-faced woman who affected the flowing velvet skirts and boots of a Pueblo woman, and kept her ash-blond hair wound into a Pueblo hairstyle that reminded Annja irresistibly of Princess Leia.

  At odd moments Annja found herself talking shop with her hostess. She enjoyed it. Dr. Skarsgaard, as she was professionally known, was a remarkably erudite woman even given her profession. It was certainly not every day Annja talked with somebody who was fluent in both Old Norse and Keresan, along with her native tongue, English, and slangy New Mexican Spanish.

  Despite having come remarkably far afield of both her homeland and her scientific discipline Maria seemed to thrive in these New Mexico hills. She proved an avid and adept cross-cultural cook. It was just that it was too early in the day for lutefisk empañadas. As far as Annja was concerned it was always too early for them.

  Annja did accept a refill of her coffee from one of the Martínez granddaughters, a fourteen-year-old who dressed like a cowgirl. Edgar and Maria’s sons and daughters, their number indeterminate to Annja, seemed to share their father’s predilection for blondes.

  “Why are you so convinced they’re in the area, Tommy?” asked a tall, spare man with gray braids. Frank was a Minnetonka Lakota from Minnesota, who’d worked for the BIA in the Southwest for years before retiring to fish Conchas Lake, which lay fairly nearby to the northeast.

  Tom’s Indian old boys weren’t all South Plains or Southwestern types. They weren’t even all Indians. A few New Mexican Latinos and a few Anglos had passed through in the past day or two.

  What all the old boys did have in common was that they were one and all military veterans, mostly with combat experience. Over the decades Tom had met them in American Legion and VFW outposts, at state fairs and gatherings of Nations. It turned out to be a very effective form of networking.

  “Well, see, Frank,” said Miguel Escobar, a retired Jicarilla Apache tribal cop with prominent cheekbones and sunken intense eyes. “They hit Albuquerque two days ago.”

  “Which means they could be anywhere in the whole wide world by now,” Frank replied.

  “No,” Tom said, shaking his head. “These boys won’t want to wander too far outside their comfort zone.”

  “Typical perps,” Escobar said.

  “Also, they’re making a political statement,” Tom said. “They’re playing to Indians, and the South Plains peoples, in particular. Although they’re also trying to stir up every random revolutionary wannabe in the entire United States.”

  He cast a quick glance at Annja. She had told him, belatedly, about the battle in the abandoned training center outside Lawton. He in turn had passed the tip along to his fellow Staties. They had found the site cleaned of bodies and most evidence—but despite extensive cleaning, lots of spilled blood hadn’t been eradicated. Tom had not been pleased with Annja for holding out on him. Although he did claim he understood her reasoning, especially now that the Dogs were revealed not just to have infiltrated law enforcement, but to all intents and purposes been law enforcement.

  “So this is where their target audience is,” Tom said, tapping the maps strewn across the massive coffee table, “not Idaho or Mexico or Kabul.”

  “But with satellite news and the Internet they can still deliver their message from those places,” Frank said.

  “They want the FBI to spill Indian blood on Indian land,” said Aldo MacArthur, a wiry little Navajo who had fought as a RAG-boat gunner in the Vietnam War.

  Frank straightened up, jutting out his jaw and nodding. That argument had force to any Indian who still felt the ties of the old culture.

  Standing outside the circle of sagely nodding men, Johnny caught Annja’s eye. He jerked his head toward the door. Brightening, she nodded and stood preparing the excuse of going outside to stretch her legs.

  The old boys were so into it they never noticed the young folks leaving. Or more likely, Annja suspected, they paid no attention. Tom Ten Bears never missed a thing; she was certain some of his cronies were equally sharp.

  I just hope they’re sharp enough, she thought.

  25

  “So what’s this thing between you and George Abell?” Annja said as she and Johnny walked along the lee of a ridge, where the piñon and juniper scrub had given way to scrub oak. “If it’s not too painful to talk about, I mean.”

  In response to Annja’s question concerning his history with the Crazy Dog leader, Johnny shrugged and laughed. It wasn’t a very cheerful laugh.

  “Might as well talk it out,” h
e said. “I can’t think of much else right now.”

  “Understood.”

  It was a bright day, with high clouds like white horse-tails brushing across a high wide sky of almost-painful blue. The wind blew chill. Annja kept her jacket zipped and her hands in the pockets.

  She liked walking and talking with Johnny Ten Bears. His company felt comfortable. Even if his charm and sheer masculine presence was a constant reminder of the sort of thing she tended to miss out on in the life-way she had half chosen, half had thrust upon her.

  “George was totally my bête noire growing up,” Johnny said. “He was a year ahead of me, and we were always in the same school. And he had a real passion for picking on me. He and his rich little toadies.”

  “Why?”

  “He was wealthy and a jock, even though he never got rid of that fat gut. I was a skinny kid who spent way too much time with my nose buried in a book—that was something George had in common with my dad, disapproving of that.”

  “But I thought your father was a big believer in education,” Annja said. “He married an anthropologist, after all, just the way our host did.”

  “Yeah. Well. We’re complicated.” He grinned at her. “I guess you picked up on that. Lot of us Kiowa and Comanche are big believers in education. But there are contradictions, too. We still grow up with the old-school warrior-hero-jock ethos of our Plains forefathers. And then there’s that whole military-cop thing. You know my dad’s not stupid—might surprise you to know I never thought he was. But the larger the mind, the more room there seems to be for contradictions, you know?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “So, anyway. George didn’t like me. I didn’t like him. Then there were our dads. Ronald Abell didn’t like my dad. My dad returned the feeling with interest. Abell loved money and was never too scrupulous about where he got it. Dad was the ultrazealous cop type you’ve come to know so well. He was always looking to bring Abell down, from the time he was a common trooper right out of the academy. Thought he was a crook.”