Skin Walk (A Lacey Fitzpatrick and Sam Firecloud Mystery Book 2)

by Melissa Bowersock

  “Thanks. That was kind of weird in itself. Coyotes are very common out there, but they rarely attack people. They’re more apt to go after chickens or small dogs. Plus my cousin had lived out there his whole life. He knew the land, knew the animals. He wouldn’t be caught off guard like that.”

  Lacey filed all that away. “So what’s the thinking about it?”

  “I’m not sure,” Sam admitted. “Gabe, my brother, said Grampa has a bad feeling about it. He wants me to come out there and check it out.” Sam paused. “You wanna come with me?”

  Lacey sat up in her chair. “Come with you? And work the case?” In her mind, she was already clearing her calendar.

  “Yeah,” Sam said, “if there is one. Can you get away for a couple days?”

  “As a matter of fact, I can,” she said. “I just finished up a big case and I’ve got nothing now but piddly stuff, just background checks. I can do those anywhere.”

  Sam chuckled. “You better bring a hotspot with you. There’s very little wifi out on the res. There are some places even cell phones don’t work.”

  “Oh, good to know,” she said. “Okay, when do you want to go?”

  “Is tomorrow too soon?”

  “Tomorrow’s perfect,” she said.

  “Okay, then. That’s a plan. Oh… can you drive?”

  “Of course.” Lacey laughed. “I know—your truck isn’t too dependable. How about if I pick you up at 8:00 AM?”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  “See you then.”

  ~~~

  TWO

  Lacey’s compact car was getting crowded. The trunk was full of luggage, soft duffels and smaller bathroom cases, and she had a cooler on the back seat for drinks and snacks. Sam tossed a roughout leather jacket in beside it before he folded his lanky body into the passenger seat.

  Lacey tried not to stare. He looked kind of hunky in the black turtleneck, his long blue-black hair caught back in a ponytail. In the months since she’d seen him, she’d forgotten how striking he was with his copper skin and intense, dark eyes.

  “I didn’t know what the weather’s like there, so I brought some of everything,” she said as she steered the car toward the freeway.

  “It’ll be cool during the day and cold as hell at night,” he said.

  Lacey glanced over. “Really? In Arizona?”

  “It’s high desert,” he said. “Gets down to below zero at times, and that’s not counting the wind chill. And the wind always blows there.”

  “Oh. Well, good thing I brought a jacket,” she said.

  “And plenty of layers, I hope. You’ll need them.”

  “So we’re going to Tuba City?” she asked. “I don’t have any maps of Arizona, but I’m assuming you know how to get there.”

  “Yup. Just head east. We’ll go north from Flagstaff.”

  “Sounds easy enough.” The only hard part, she thought, was navigating the tangled knot of freeways that was L.A., getting out of town and onto I-40. But she’d driven these freeways all her life. It was just a matter of paying attention to the interchanges, connecting one leg of the trip to the next.

  “Now, you said your grampa has a bad feeling about your cousin’s death?” she asked. “Bad like what? Do you know?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “Remember I told you that I thought he had some of my sensitivity to ghosts?”

  “Yeah.” When they’d first started working together, Lacey had asked if Sam’s mediumistic tendencies were a family legacy. He thought not, with the exception of his grandfather, who seemed to have a small degree of sensitivity.

  “Apparently Grampa went out to the place where the body was found and got some bad vibes. I’ll have to talk to him. Either he didn’t explain to Gabe or Gabe didn’t understand, because he wasn’t too clear about it.”

  “And Gabe is your… older brother? Younger?”

  “Older by three years.”

  “You have other siblings?” Lacey asked. Sam had never spoken much about his family except when he’d revealed that both his parents were dead.

  “No. Just the two of us.”

  “I’m from a small family, too,” she said. “Me and my brother and my parents.”

  Sam snorted. “I wouldn’t call my family small. I’ve got twelve first cousins and I’ve lost track of how many second cousins.”

  Lacey looked over in shock. “Twelve first cousins? Jeez. I have four. Do they all live on the reservation?”

  “Most of them, but not all. A couple live in Flag, one’s in Phoenix and one’s in Texas.”

  Lacey had a feeling she was going to have to call on all her memory skills to keep track of everyone. Luckily she was usually pretty good with names.

  “How old is your grampa?” she asked.

  “Eighty-three.”

  “Does he still get around pretty good? Still sharp?” She tried to picture the ancient Navajo.

  “Oh, yeah. He moves slow, but he was always like that. Still sharp as a tack.” Sam looked over and smiled crookedly. “He’s not much of a talker, though.”

  Lacey laughed. “Oh, like someone else I know?” Sam’s silent stoicism had driven her crazy when they first started collaborating.

  “Yeah, kinda,” he said. “But you’ll like him.”

  “I’m sure I will,” she said. If he was anything like Sam, she would.

  Leaving L.A. behind, Lacey piloted her little car onto I-40 and headed unerringly east. The lush conglomeration of cities—all concrete, palm trees and bougainvilleas—thinned and became increasingly spare as the freeway cut through the Mojave Desert. In the crisp, cold winter air, it was possible to see for miles—miles of tan and gray desolation with a few Joshua trees here and there. After what she was used to, this seemed like a moonscape.

  Hours later in Flagstaff, they stopped for a late, late lunch and a respite from the car. As they sat in Chili’s and ate their burgers and fries, Lacey stared out the window at the snow-covered San Francisco Peaks that rose above the college town.

  “Pretty,” she said.

  “You’ve never been there?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I haven’t been much of anywhere but California and Las Vegas.”

  “Good representational sample of the country,” he said with glittering eyes.

  Lacey threw a French fry at him. “Where have you been?” she challenged.

  “Oh, here and there. Oregon, Washington, Texas. Mostly places in the west.”

  Lacey turned her gaze back to the Peaks. “Is there skiing up there?”

  “Yeah. Arizona Snowbowl.”

  “Skiing in Arizona,” she mused. “Who knew? Do you ski?”

  “Nah. I kinda like to travel on my own two feet.”

  “So how far is Tuba City from here?” She pushed her empty plate away, not really anxious to get back on the road, but anxious to be done driving. It’d been a while since she’d been on a road trip.

  “Just about an hour. Not far.”

  “And it’s named that because…?”

  “Not what you think,” he said. “It’s named after a Hopi man, Tuuva. The Hopi reservation is inside the Navajo reservation.”

  “Oh, okay. I thought maybe everyone in town played the tuba.”

  Now it was his turn to throw a French fry at her. “The only tubas you’ll find are in the school band. Let’s go.”

  As they approached the car, he surprised her with a question.

  “Want me to drive?”

  She regarded him suspiciously. He’d never offered before. She’d always driven anywhere they went because his truck was an old rattletrap.

  “You’ll treat her nice?” she asked.

  He arched an eyebrow at her. “Her?”

  “Blanche.” She tossed him the keys and headed for the passenger side.

  “Blanche?”

  Lacey shrugged. “She’s white.”

  She was glad to see Sam treating her car with care, observing all traffic rules. He headed up the main d
rag through the older part of Flag, past historic buildings and the iconic train station.

  “My brother works over there,” he said, pointing to a block business. As they drove past, Lacey could see stacks and stacks of blocks, plus huge piles of black cinders.

  “Where do the cinders come from?” she asked.

  Sam pointed. “See that half-eaten mountain there?” The side of the small peak was gouged out, revealing nothing but black volcanic rock inside. “There are over 400 volcanoes and vents in this area. The Peaks are an extinct volcano.”

  Lacey peered over at the snow-covered mountains with a new respect. Growing up in L.A., she was used to earthquakes; not so much the idea of having a volcano in the back yard. As Sam steered the car around the southeast flank of the Peaks and headed north, Lacey was just as glad to leave them behind.

  The high desert of the reservation was a surprise to her. Barren, yes, like the Mojave, but also beautiful. There were jagged canyons torn into the earth by ephemeral flash floods, and rounded, eroded bluffs horizontally striped with delicate shades of blue and brown. She took a few pictures as they drove.

  “This is part of the Painted Desert,” Sam said.

  “It’s beautiful,” she remarked.

  He gave a quiet snort. “Most people prefer trees and grass.”

  They passed two huge white spires of rock jutting up abruptly from the flat pan of dirt and scrub.

  “No,” she said, watching them slide by, “this is… stunning. Magical.”

  “Speaking of which,” he said, “I should tell you a few things.” She pulled her eyes from the otherworldly landscape and gave Sam her full attention. “After someone dies,” he said, “we never speak their name.”

  She tilted her head at him. “Never?”

  “Not if we can avoid it. We want the spirit to continue on its journey, so speaking its name or disturbing its burial place is forbidden. It can confuse or, worse, anger the spirit and cause it to stay around and even hurt people.”

  Lacey watched him as he spoke, wondering if he were only repeating what he had been taught or if he actually believed it. She couldn’t tell by his expressionless features.

  “Um, I’m confused,” she said, trying to figure out how to say this respectfully. “In L.A., you go to the places where people have died, you speak their names, you talk to them. If that’s forbidden…”

  “It’s different out here,” he said. He glanced over at her, his mouth a thin line.

  “Different… how?” She trod lightly, keeping her voice even. She had a prickly feeling that this was one area that Sam would not compromise on.

  “You’ll see,” was all he said.

  For a few minutes they drove in silence, the surreal landscape sliding by the car. The sun was edging down closer to the buttes and ridges on the west, the light slanting almost horizontally through breaks and low spots. Lacey couldn’t be sure if it was a subtle quality of the light or her own cautioned imagination, but there certainly seemed to be an eerie quality to the air.

  “Okay, but if we can’t say his name, how do we talk about him? Refer to him?” Having no reference for the magical, she reverted back to sheer practicality.

  “I’ll refer to him as my cousin,” Sam said. “He’s my oldest cousin, my dad’s oldest brother’s firstborn. You’ll see how we do it.”

  Lacey nodded. In her mind, it would seem more respectful to call him by name, but when in Rome…

  “Just so you know,” Sam said quietly, “his name is Harlan.”

  She glanced over and met Sam’s black, bottomless eyes. He watched her for a few seconds, as if imprinting the importance of all this on her. She swallowed, then nodded.

  “Okay. Thanks,” she said. “Anything else I should know?”

  “Yeah.” Sam checked his side mirror, then put on the blinker and turned eastward on another two lane highway. “We’ll stop at a store up here so we can pick up some tobacco.”

  She cut him a look of confusion. “Tobacco?”

  “Yeah. Think of it as a hospitality gift.” He didn’t look over at her, but she saw the corners of his mouth curve upward.

  “Whatever you say, boss,” she said.

  The store was a small affair, more a convenience store than a full-fledged market. Sam went directly to a counter that held racks of tobacco in pouches and long packets of beef jerky. He picked out two pouches of tobacco and handed them to Lacey.

  “You want anything else?” he asked her.

  “Uh, I don’t know,” she said. “Do I?”

  “We can always come back,” he said. “Wait. Let me grab one more thing.”

  He went to another area of the store and returned with a large round tub of lard. He set that on the counter and pulled out his wallet.

  Lacey hurried to set the tobacco beside the lard and dig in her purse for her wallet.

  “I’ve got it,” he said.

  “I’ll get the next one,” Lacey said. Sure, the next time they bought tobacco and lard.

  The woman behind the counter smiled to them and rang up the sale. Sam said something to her in a language totally foreign to Lacey, and the woman’s smile expanded into a wide grin. She answered back, and Sam laughed. Lacey saw the woman’s eyes slide to her, and she managed a tight smile. Sam gathered up the goods and led the way back to the car.

  “Was that Navajo?” she asked as he pulled back onto the highway.

  “Yeah. Sorry. Wasn’t trying to cut you out.”

  “No prob,” she said, but she had the sneaking suspicion there was a subtle—or not so subtle—joke at her expense back there. Well, she was definitely a stranger in a strange land. Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, she thought dryly.

  But the language surprised her. She’d always had a pretty good ear, and even though she only took a couple years of French in school, most of the time she could at least pick out the Latin or Greek basis in words. Not with Navajo. But obviously, she told herself, the Native American languages developed completely independently. Might as well be Martian to her.

  The sun had disappeared behind the western horizon, taking with it the last of the golden light. Instead, the air turned a frigid purple, tinting the buttes with the cooler tones. Lacey looked eastward and noted a band of blue that sat above the horizon, stretching north and south as far as she could see.

  “That’s weird,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Look over there,” she said. “See that swathe of blue just above the horizon?”

  Sam looked. “Oh, that,” he said, unconcerned. “That’s the earth’s shadow projecting out into space.”

  Lacey stared at the blue band, then swiveled back toward Sam. He drove on, no sign of a joking smile on his stoic face.

  “You’re kidding,” she said finally. She turned back to the blue band, mesmerized.

  “Nope. That’s what it is.”

  She gaped at the phenomenon, trying to rectify it in her mind, but it wouldn’t quite fit into what she knew about the world. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said finally.

  “Light’s different here,” he said. “You’ll probably see a few things here that you’ve never seen before.”

  If this was any indication, that was an understatement, she thought. She had the sudden feeling that she was not just in a different territory—she was on a different planet.

  This was going to be interesting, she thought.

  ~~~

  THREE

  Sam turned on the headlights as the sky darkened and the blue band disappeared into the murk. Lacey could see occasional lights dotting the countryside on either side of the highway.

  “Where are we staying?” she asked abruptly. For some reason, she hadn’t even thought about it before.

  “My brother’s,” he said. “We’re almost there.”

  He slowed the car and turned off on a dirt road, the rattling brrrtt of a cattle guard under the wheels startling Lacey. Up ahead, she could make out several houses i
n a loose cluster. The notion of being grouped together was only because there was nothing else around, she realized, as the houses were actually fairly far apart.

  Sam drove to the rightmost house, a simple rectangular building, nothing fancy. White with blue trim. Next to the house were two pickup trucks, both of which had seen better days.

  Lacey got out of the car and opened a back door, ready to grab suitcases.

  “Leave the luggage for now,” Sam said. “Just bring one pack of tobacco.”

  Lacey complied. Sam brought the lard. They approached the house, mindful of toys strewn along the way, as the light from the windows didn’t provide much illumination.

  Just as they reached the door, it swung open. Light spilled across the threshold, split by the silhouetted form of an average-sized man.

  Navajo words tumbled out, the sounds so foreign to Lacey that they sounded only like nonsense syllables. Sam laughed and answered in kind, and the man stood aside so they could enter.

  Lacey stepped inside and glanced around. Rust colored carpet, off-white walls. Flame-stitched couches and chairs, oak furniture, wide-screen TV. Also a delicious smell that set her mouth to watering. She breathed easier. Nothing Martian here.

  “Lacey, this is my brother, Gabriel, and his wife Roxanne. Lacey Fitzpatrick.”

  Lacey focused on the faces. Gabe was a couple inches shorter than Sam, carried a bit more weight, but the nose and brow ridge were the same. Roxanne was Lacey’s height and willowy. She wore teal scrubs, and her long hair flowed down her back like a blue-black waterfall.

  Lacey shook hands with both, holding the tobacco in her left hand and not quite sure when, or to whom, to offer it. “Hello. So nice to meet you.”

  Roxanne solved the dilemma. She shook Lacey’s hand warmly and then gently took the pouch. “Thank you so much. That’s very sweet. Come in, sit down. Can I get you something to drink?”

  Sam offered up the lard and Roxanne took it happily, her face lighting up at the sight of it. She kissed Sam on the cheek and moved into the kitchen.

  Lacey took a spot on the couch and Sam sat beside her. “Just water would be great for me,” she said.