Enemy Way
Authors: Aimée & David Thurlo
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Contents
Also by Aimée and David Thurlo
To Melissa Singer, Jen Hogan, and the folks at Forge who believed in Ella and helped smooth out her path.
And to Meg Ruley, who believes in us.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To those people who have helped us but whose jobs or affiliations make it inappropriate for them to accept a public thank-you: You know who you are, and we’re both deeply grateful for the kindness you’ve shown us.
PROLOGUE
Navajo Police Special Investigator Ella Clah bent down to the water fountain installed in the tiny alcove of the Shiprock bank lobby. The water was so cold it hurt her teeth, but at least it didn’t have that metallic aftertaste like the fountain at the station.
It was her day off, but she needed to deposit her paycheck. She’d been carrying it around since yesterday. She hated making
ATM deposits, so she’d rushed over this afternoon barely making it before closing time.
Straightening up, Ella noticed the bank manager standing behind his desk, key ring in hand, staring oddly toward the door.
“Nobody move! This is a robbery.” A man’s voice yelled from across the room. He sounded Anglo, with a trace of a southern accent, maybe Texan.
Ella ducked out of sight and took out her
pistol, peeking around the corner of the alcove. Two masked perps were just inside the lobby door, brandishing a pistol and sawed-off shotgun.
“Everyone down on the floor. Now!” shouted the man with the accent. He was waving a pistol—a nine-millimeter Browning. Everyone quickly complied, including the old man and woman who’d been behind Ella earlier, and now were depositing their Social Security
checks.
Nobody except the robbers made a sound, which was a good thing. Noise and excitement tended to make armed criminals even more nervous and apt to pull the trigger.
Ella watched the man with the Browning. He was a real cool customer. As she studied him, he grabbed Herbert, the bank manager, by the collar, and stuck the pistol to his head, forcing him out from behind his desk. “Give me
the keys to the cash drawers!”
Ella ducked back out of sight as the perp with the shotgun took a quick look around the room. She had to consider her options carefully. If she made her move now and tried to make an arrest, two customers and at least three bank employees could get hit if the robbers decided to open fire. But there was another possibility. If she could avoid detection for a while
longer, maybe the opportunity to get the drop on them would present itself, or she could follow them outside and try to make the arrest in the parking lot.
She still vividly remembered a heavily armed lunatic in a crowded L.A. diner. It had been a very close call for her and a bunch of other people. Hostages had been wounded. She’d finally put a stop to it by killing the gunman at point-blank
range. She didn’t want to have to do that here again today.
The leader, the one with the Browning, took a set of keys from Herbert and put the pistol to the back of his head. For a second Ella wondered if the perp was planning on pulling the trigger. She took aim, but Browning just laughed, then leaped over to the teller’s side of the high counter. The employees over there had already disappeared,
probably curled up on the floor, praying that a little cooperation would get them home alive tonight.
Shotgun continued to watch the room, sweeping the sawed-off pump around like a fire hose, making sure nobody else came into the bank. Ella kept low behind the corner of the alcove. Fortunately, one of those stand-alone counters was between her and the robbers, and there were none of those surveillance
mirrors to show where she was hiding.
In another minute the leader filled a bank bag with cash. As he tossed over the money and climbed back across onto the customer side, Ella took advantage of his preoccupation and slipped out beside the island counter. If she had figured it right, it would be possible to edge around behind the robbers without being seen.
“Let’s go. Keep watching for trouble.”
Browning yelled to Shotgun, then he turned around to the prone customers and employees. “Nobody gets up for five minutes. If I see one of you dipsticks so much as raise your head, I’ll come back in and blow your brains out.”
Shotgun stopped at the door and looked outside. “Looks clear. Here I go.”
Ella inched closer, and saw the first robber disappear from view. When Browning passed by the counter,
Ella saw her chance. She reached out and grabbed his pistol hand, puting her own nine-millimeter Sig into the small of his back. He flinched, but let her take the pistol without a word.
“Good choice, smart mouth,” Ella whispered. “Now keep walking and don’t make any sudden moves. I’m a cop, but I’ll blow your spine in half without a thought to save these people’s lives.” Ella prodded the man
forward, slipping the Browning into her jacket pocket while she walked toward the front entrance. “Call 911, Herbert,” she said a bit louder, without looking away from her captive.
They made it to the door without incident, and with the perp in front of her, Ella was screened somewhat from the other man outside. “If you want to live, stay smart.”
They stepped outside, her pistol still in the
small of the man’s back. Ella tried not to tense up. She knew she still had to confront the man with the shotgun less than twenty feet in front of her. He was carrying the weapon unobtrusively down at his side, and surveying the parking lot for cops when her makeshift strategy was suddenly put to the test.
“Cop!” a woman screamed. Ella looked to her right and saw a woman pointing a pistol at
her from out the window of an old brown Chevy.
The man with the shotgun whirled and fired, dropping the money sack in the parking lot and doing some serious damage to the big blue mailbox just to her left. Ella shoved her prisoner down below the brick planter in front of the bank, following him behind cover just as the shotgun went off again. Chunks of brick and shreds of boxwood showered the
wall above Ella’s head, and her prisoner groaned in pain.
By then, the woman in the Chevy was firing too, screaming and yelling at the top of her lungs. Bullets struck the cinder-block wall in a half-dozen places above the planter, but Ella had already left the wounded robber and was moving toward the other end of the structure.
Fear left a bitter taste in her mouth, but training and instinct
spurred her on. Ella rose slightly, risking a fast look, and saw Shotgun jump into the car with the bag of money. As she raised her pistol and took aim at the shooter, she spotted two people standing by a pickup a few vehicles farther down, right in her line of sight. She’d planned to hit the robber’s front tire, but it was at the wrong angle. Shifting her aim, she fired two quick shots into the
Chevy’s engine block instead.
Shotgun fired, and she was forced to duck down again. Ella heard the squeal of tires and, in frustration, watched as the vehicle roared down the street, heading away past the grocery store. She couldn’t even get one shot off without endangering civilians, but she smiled slowly as she saw smoke coming from underneath the hood. With luck, they wouldn’t get too far.
Ella hurried back to her prisoner who was laying on the sidewalk behind the planter, cursing a blue streak. Blood oozed from buckshot wounds along his upper thigh. As she crouched beside him, Herbert poked his head out the door of the bank, and noticed the wounded man. “Want me to call an ambulance too, Officer Clah?”
“You better get them here fast. I’m bleeding to death!” the robber said, and
moaned.
“You’ll live,” Ella assured him. Giving Herbert a nod, she read the perp his rights. “If I were you, I’d start thinking of a way to cut a deal. Life as you know it has just come to an end.”
ONE
Ella stood at the window, watching the last rays of the fading sun arc across the land in blood red sheets, changing the soft earth tones of the New Mexican desert into crimson hues. The rugged mesas floated among a soft haze created by the dust that lingered in the air, easing the stark outlines of the sagebrush- and juniper-dotted canyons.
At least the morning hours today had been hers
to enjoy. Gathering medicinal herbs with her mother and learning about the Plant People, had left her with a sense of connectedness to the
Dineh,
one she hadn’t felt in a long time. And while the late afternoon had been an adventure she didn’t want to repeat again soon, it certainly could have gone a lot worse, as it had for the person she’d come to interview.
Now, as she waited in the hospital
lobby for her crime scene officer, the rush of excitement and adrenalin she’d felt earlier finally started to vanish along with the sunlight.
There had been a time when serious crime had not been a problem here on the Rez, but those days were long gone. The outside world had crept in, leaving its mark on them all. Admittedly, crime often took a different form here, one unique to the Navajo Nation.
The spiritual and material worlds were too intertwined in The People’s thinking for it to be otherwise. Yet, lately it seemed that even that distinction was becoming less pronounced.
As round-faced Sergeant Tache came into the lobby, Ella turned and faced him. Like herself and a half dozen other specialists and detectives on the Tribal force, Tache wore civilian clothes, which in the Four Corners
usually meant western boots, snaps instead of buttons on a colorful print shirt, and jeans. Big silver belt buckles were also almost standard. Only the sidearm and badge he wore clipped on his belt would identify him as a police sergeant, and even those would usually be hidden from casual view by his Levi jacket.
“I got your message from the dispatcher and came right over,” she said. “We still
haven’t found the other two perps or that brown Chevy. Are the doctors finally going to let us interview the prisoner? I tried to get him to waive his right before, but he’s a tough nut to crack.”
“His attorney was here when he came out of recovery ten minutes ago and they’ve been talking ever since. The nurses had him moved upstairs to Room Two-oh-two, so I stationed an officer outside and cuffed
the prisoner to the bed. I can tell you what else we’ve learned about him on the way up there.”
“Then let’s go.”
Tache’s expression was somber as he walked with her to the elevator. He stared ahead, organizing his thoughts, and when he spoke, his words were measured and well thought-out. Ella had expected no less from this man who was an integral part of their generally successful crime scene
investigations team. Tache had been the first officer to arrive after the bank robbery that afternoon, and had been the last one to leave the crime scene two hours later.
“The County Sheriff wants to move the prisoner to the jail in Farmington as soon as possible, but that’s up to Big Ed and the Tribal attorneys. It probably won’t be for twenty-four hours anyway, according to the doctor who briefed
me. By the way, the fingerprint results confirm the ID you made from the mug files. He’s Joey Baker, all right.”