by Ethan Cross
“What do you mean young-ish?”
“I was trying to be generous. Which brings me to another point. Perhaps Liana would be a good candidate for continuing the Ackerman bloodline. You’re certainly not getting any younger.”
The thought caused Ackerman’s rage to burn brightly. He heard the old demons screaming. The mere thought of passing on his genetic material, and perhaps his curse, made him want to hurt someone. Not because of his father’s insult, but because of the terrible pain it dredged up from the darkest depths of his soul.
He said, “That will never happen.”
In reply, Thomas White grinned and said, “Don’t you mean never happen again?”
He was about to turn on his father and spout some hate, but thankfully, Liana brought him back to reality as she asked, “Frank? Are you okay? Were you talking to someone?”
Ackerman barely heard her. The tears rained down his cheeks, and he wondered if this truly was the end. Was today the day he would pass from this world?
She said, “Frank, I got the microwave. What do I do now? You’re going to be okay. I’m going to help you.”
He smiled even as he could feel himself fading from consciousness. “I’m so glad you’re here Liana. Have I ever told you the story of my Rainbow Goddess?”
“You’ve never really told me much of anything. We just met a few hours ago.”
“Oh, that’s right. I guess I just feel like I’ve known you longer.”
“Um… thanks, I guess. What am I supposed to do with the microwave?”
“First, I need you to get another item for me.”
“Oh come on! Are you even awake?”
“Although my physical body is slowly exsanguinating, all is well with my mind and soul. We’re going to need a car battery.”
“Where in the hell am I going to get that?”
“Out of a motor vehicle.”
“But I moved my Explorer into that old shed. Canyon and his snipers would see me!”
“He already knows that you’re here, and that you have changed the color of your coat.”
“I was more concerned about them shooting me.”
“Ahh, yes. That’s a definite possibility. They’ll be looking for a clean shot at me, but I honestly can’t say what they’ll do with you.”
“You are out of your damn mind if you think I’m going to walk straight into someone’s crosshairs. I don’t even know if you’re with it enough to be giving orders. Tell me what in the hell you need all this stuff for, and then I’ll think about getting your battery.”
Ackerman could feel his consciousness fading. The darkness growing ever closer. His body was shutting down to maintain energy, and he had no intentions of wasting that precious energy once again explaining himself to a normal. So, instead of replying, he merely leaned his head over and pretended that the healing sleep he expected to come at any moment was already upon him.
46
30 years earlier…
The biggest thing that changed after that day with Dr. Chee was that the boy truly considered himself to be a man. In fact, he considered himself to be superior to most men twice his age. The second change had been that the boy had demanded that his mother unlock the tin box in the top of her closet that contained grandfather’s old pistol.
From that day on, for the next two years of his life, the rusty old gun became his best friend. As he sat in the front room, between clients, he would clean the gun and practice with it. He wore it on his hip whenever he was home, in plain view of every single one of his mother’s clients. The word had already spread that he was a hard kid. At school, the others used to stay away from him because they thought he was strange, and he thought they were stupid. Now, they stayed away out of fear, and he liked that. People stayed out of his way and his business, which was fine by him.
The pistol was a single action revolver known as a Peacemaker that his grandfather had purchased at a flea market in Flagstaff, AZ. The boy, Xavier, had researched his new weapon thoroughly, learning that the particular model was known as the gun that had won the west. He translated that as the gun that had drove his ancestors from their homes and then locked them in free-range prisons they called reservations.
But none of that was the gun’s fault. One shouldn’t judge the tool for how it’s wielded.
And Xavier couldn’t wait to use his new toy on one of his mother’s clients. For two years now, his small speckled notebooks had been filled with drawings of him gunning down his enemies like a gunslinger in the old west. The ones he hated the most were the belegana men who drove in just for a visit. He reserved a special measure of hatred for them.
Xavier imagined that there was money to be made in prostitution, but he found that the lion’s shares went to bribing the police and mother’s various addictions. Still, it hadn’t taken him long to skim enough off the top to purchase a quickdraw instructional video. He had watched the old cowboy explain the various techniques in detail until he had memorized the contents of the VHS tape. Then he sat for hours in the living room or in the brush out behind the trailer, honing his skills with the pistol down to an art.
He dreamed that one day his skills and the protection of the pistol would mean that he would not wake up in the night screaming or fearing that one of his mother’s clients would creep into his room at night, looking for a different kind of action. The only problem was that guns were illegal on the Rez, and ammo was scarce. Luckily, he had made friends with an old man in Prescott who reloaded his own. Still, he hated the fact that he was better at pulling the gun from its holster and twirling it around than he was at actually shooting it.
Standing in the brush behind their shack, practicing, he snatched the gun from its holster and took aim. In his mind, he imagined the face of a particular belegana who had been revisiting the trailer for a few months every couple of weeks. The client always pulled up in a big new Cadillac. Xavier imagined blowing Mr. Cadillac’s head off as he raised the six shooter.
His sister’s voice made him jump as she said, “I figured I’d find you out back playing with yourself.”
The boy bristled, embarrassed at having been caught mid-fantasy. His little sister, Reyna, chuckled, but he silenced her with a death glare.
Reyna’s expression turned sour, and she said, “Momma’s too sick to work today.”
“Just make sure she has her fix. She’ll be fine.”
“She was coughing up blood. We need to take her to the clinic in Shiprock.”
Xavier shook his head. “What are a bunch of damn doctors going to tell us that we don’t already know?”
“For starters, what’s wrong with Momma.”
“She’s dying, Reyna. She has the same sickness that grandfather had. It’s only a matter of time, and there’s nothing anyone can do for her.”
Tears welled in her eyes. “You don’t know that.”
“I do, and so do you. You’ve heard grandfather’s stories of working in the mines for the belegana government with no masks, no protection, no decontamination. He would come home with uranium dust on his clothes and hold Momma. His radioactive overalls went into the same water as the rest of the clothes.”
“Shut up! I don’t want to hear any more. Momma can’t work today. Cancel her appointments.”
“If she takes the day off, she’ll just lay on her back and get high. She might as well make some money while she’s laying there.”
“She’s going to the doctor today if I have to call the police to give us an escort,” Reyna said.
Xavier growled deep in his throat, but after a moment, he slid the pistol back into the holster on his hip and said, “Fine. We’ll take her to the clinic in Shiprock. But it’s pointless.”
Reyna smiled. She was the most beautiful when she smiled. “Thank you,” she said.
He merely nodded as he undid his belt and laid the pistol across an old bench. Xavier knew that the trip would be a waste of time, but if it satisfied Reyna and got Momma back to work, then it wa
s worth going through the motions. He knew, however, that mother would soon be another victim of the belegana’s wars. Just like Grandfather. And one day, he and Reyna would probably share the same fate. He had heard that their ground water and soil was still contaminated and that the water they drank and bathed in—which they had to haul over in fifty gallon tanks, since like much of the Rez, they didn’t have access to water and power grids—was just as toxic.
It made him so angry. He dreamed of one day opening a restaurant out on Highway 666 catering to the belegana travelers. He fantasized about digging up the floor of one of the mines where Grandfather had worked or any of the hundreds of open and uncleaned uranium mines throughout the area. Then, in his daydream, he would feed the uranium dust to the unsuspecting belegana and their children.
Xavier’s smile grew wide as he contemplated his revenge and the ways he could use the belegana’s own poisons against them.
47
Liana stood at the back of the weather-beaten general store trying to give herself a pep talk. You’re a law enforcement officer, she told herself, you can do this. But when she tried to move, her legs wouldn’t cooperate. She stood frozen in fear. Assault rifles and pistols wouldn’t be able to reach her at this distance, but a .30-06 with a scope was a different story.
She’d been racking her brain for an alternative, something more clever than merely walking out into the open and crossing the divide between the main building and the shed. Some kind of trick that would outsmart the snipers, their high-powered rifles, and their bullets that traveled faster than the speed of sound. Unfortunately, her best plan was to run as fast as she could.
Liana’s grandmother, being a traditional Diné, didn’t care much for belegana television. She did, however, occasionally get interested in certain programs. One in particular was the show MythBusters. On one particular episode of MythBusters, Grandmother had been fascinated by a test they did suggesting that you got just as wet running through the rain as you did calmly walking. Liana couldn’t wrap her mind around how that could be true, but perhaps there was something to it.
Was it possible she would draw less attention just walking over to the shed calmly and returning with the battery? Or maybe she should go for something in between. A light jog, perhaps.
You’re stalling, she told herself.
Again, she tried to move, but still her legs wouldn’t cooperate. She needed a better plan, but there wasn’t time. Frank was bleeding out in there.
Finally, after a moment more of inner turmoil, some deep reserve of hidden courage pushed Liana forward, out into the open, into the danger zone. She felt crosshairs crawling over her body and tried to imagine what was happening right now down in Canyon’s encampment. None of the underlings would fire without their commander’s go-ahead. The kill or no-kill order. Which meant that her life was in the hands of John Canyon.
Halfway there, she thought.
With the way the road curved up the bluff and the positioning of the buildings, Canyon and his gunmen would have a clear view of her from their roadblock. It was only fifty feet from the trading post to the shed, but to her, it felt like a marathon.
Three-quarters of the way, she thought.
She allowed herself to hope.
If Canyon was going to give an order to shoot, he would have surely done it by now.
Five steps. Three. Two.
Then, she was there, throwing open the side door of the rickety shed and leaning against the side of her Ford Explorer patrol vehicle as she tried to catch her breath and keep her body from shaking apart. She held out her hands, and she shook like a Parkinson’s victim. Liana hadn’t been a tribal police officer for all that long, but she had still been in some tough situations. She had pulled her gun a couple of times during sketchy traffic stops. She had arrested plenty of people for illegal alcohol and possessions of guns, drunken disorderlies, domestic disputes, the usual gamut. But there had been no murders in their area. At least, nothing that she had dealt with. Or knew about.
Liana reckoned that meant that those fifty feet and those few seconds it took her to cross the divide was the closest she’d come to death in her entire life. Obviously, Canyon had chosen to spare her, or the snipers would have taken her down. But her racing mind considered another possibility. Perhaps it had all happened so fast, despite it feeling so slow to her, that the mercenaries had no time to react and didn’t have enough time to get the shoot or no-shoot order from their superior. They had likely already been given instructions to take any possible shot at Frank, but she was a different story. And that would imply that the real danger would be in moving back from the shed to the trading post.
As she popped the hood of the Explorer and retrieved the car battery, she tried not to think about the harrowing run she would have to make back to the relative safety of the trading post. She tried not to think of how she would also be lugging a stupid car battery as she went and still she had no idea what any of this was for or if she was merely risking her life for the delusions of a half-dead madman.
48
Ackerman tried to conserve his energy without succumbing to slumber, but the longer he sat atop the small crate and pretended to sleep, the closer he came to actually doing so. Deciding that he needed a distraction and a little movement to keep what little blood he had left flowing, he walked into the front room and carefully surveyed his opponents through the scope of the Barrett rifle. His left leg was growing numb and useless, and he had to drag it the whole way. He supposed that was probably a bad sign.
From behind him, Tobias Canyon said, “You don’t look so good, my friend. Things will go much better for you if you surrender while you still have a chance.”
Ackerman stood up to full height and turned back to the boy. It wouldn’t be long, only a year or two, before Tobias would be sent off to be trained by the US government, so he could come back to fight against the US government. Just like his father and all their other little foot soldiers.
Ackerman sighed and said, “I forgot to gag you again, didn’t I?”
“If you don’t get medical help, you’re going to die soon. And that’s a fact.”
This time, he didn’t limp at all as he took two large strides to put himself within reach of Tobias. He refused to allow his injuries to show. Moving with his normal speed and grace caused terrible pain to radiate throughout his entire body. For a normal, he supposed, this would have caused a blackout or at the very least, an overwhelming sense of nausea. For him, it was akin to getting a nice massage. It made him a little uncomfortable, and he knew it to be a sign that his body was shutting down, but it also deeply troubled him to miss any opportunity to experience or inflict pain.
Rather than going for the Bowie knife, Ackerman pulled one of the push daggers from the quickdraw holster mounted in the small of his back. With a blinding movement that he had practiced thousands of times when shadowboxing, he punched out directly at Tobias Canyon’s eye as if he were going to stab the dagger straight into the center of the young man’s eyeball. But he stopped at the last second, trying to get the blade as close as he possibly could to the white orb without piercing it.
The pure fear that he saw reflected back at him was exactly what he was trying to accomplish.
Slipping the dagger back into its quickdraw sheath and leaning down nose to nose with Tobias, he said, “I wouldn’t be getting my hopes up about me passing away any time soon. I used to think that it was mere luck that I had avoided death under so many extraordinary circumstances, but now, I wonder if it’s less of me cheating death and more that death is just plain scared of me. So, if I were you, I wouldn’t count on the grim reaper to be swooping in with his sickle to save the day.”
“My father is going to cut your nuts off and feed them to you.”
Ackerman laughed hard with a wheeze and cough. “You know that’s not really something you say to someone in polite conversation. Especially to someone holding so many sharp objects.”
The young man m
erely scowled back at him.
From the direction of the back door, Ackerman heard Liana say, “I thought you were passed out.”
“Yes, well, I got bored with being mortally wounded, and so I decided to intellectually reject the idea. Did you get the battery?”
“Yes,” she said, “and it was the most frightening experience of my entire life.”
He cocked his head in confusion. “Why was there some kind of creature hiding in the engine compartment?”
“No, you freaked me out with all that sniper talk!”
He dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “I’m sorry. I was eighty-five percent sure that Mr. Canyon wasn’t going to shoot.”
“Thanks, that makes me feel much better.”
“I’m glad,” Ackerman said as he placed a strip of duct tape over Tobias Canyon’s mouth and two more over the boy’s ears for good measure.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
Rather than wasting time explaining, Ackerman turned and headed for the back room and the derelict microwave. Unfortunately, he took a step forward and then stumbled into one of the shelving units.
Liana rushed to his side and propped him up. She asked, “How’s rejecting the idea of being hurt working out for you?”
In reply, he whispered, “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Help me to the back. Lots of work and little time. Let’s get started.”
49
The past…
“I can’t believe that we didn’t just kill him,” she said.
“He surrendered,” Marcus replied.
“What difference does that make? He doesn’t deserve to be breathing.”
“We need him.”
“He won’t help us. It’s not in his nature.”
Marcus turned away from the window and leaned back against the old yellowing plaster of the bedroom wall. “My father is out there right now on a killing spree that has this whole state living in terror. And Ackerman is the only one who knows him. We have no good leads. Nothing. We need every bit of help we can get.”
