The Widow's Revenge

THE WIDOW’S
REVENGE

ALSO BY JAMES D. DOSS

Snake Dreams
Three Sisters
Stone Butterfly
Shadow Man
The Witch’s Tongue
Dead Soul
White Shell Woman
Grandmother Spider
The Night Visitor
The Shaman’s Game
The Shaman’s Bones
The Shaman Laughs
The Shaman Sings

JAMES D. DOSS

MINOTAUR BOOKS
NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE WIDOW’S REVENGE
. Copyright © 2009 by James D. Doss. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com
.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Doss, James D.

The widow’s revenge / James D. Doss.—1st ed.

       p. cm.

ISBN
978-0-312-36461-8

1. Moon, Charlie (Fictitious character: Doss)—Fiction. 2. Ute Indians—Fiction. 3. Widows—Fiction. 4. Colorado—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.O75W53 2009

  813'.54—dc22

2009016660

First Edition: November 2009

10    9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

For

Bob Cady—Los Alamos, New Mexico
Don and Margaret Hagerman—Highlands Ranch, Colorado
and
George and Mary Tubb—Tyler, Texas

THE WIDOW’S
REVENGE

The Widow Montoya’s Farm

SUSPENDED HIGH IN THE SOUTHERN SKY, THE SILVERY SATELLITE PULLS
a diaphanous cloud veil over her naked, pockmarked face. Is this a matter of modesty—does the pale lady prefer not to be seen? Or might it be the other way around—is there something on the widow’s property that White Shell Woman prefers
not to see
?

THE SLEEPER

As a youth, Loyola sought adventure, wealth, and pleasure. In her wiser, twilight years, she treasures peace above all earthly delights; a good night’s rest is a gift beyond price and the soothing lullaby of rippling waters a powerful soporific. This is one of the reasons the widow has clung to her isolated farm, which is bordered by Ignacio Creek.

The other is that the stubborn old soul is determined to die in the house where she entered the world screaming bloody murder.

ONLY A
few moaning groans and irregular heartbeats ago, when Mrs. Montoya settled her brittle bones and creaky joints into the brass four-poster and pulled a quilt over her old gray head, the widow believed herself to be alone in her isolated home. And she was, if beady-eyed mice, clicketycritching crickets, dozing blackflies, venomous red wasps, bulbous black widow spiders, and other pestilential residents were not included in the census.

Which was why, when she was awakened suddenly from a deep and blessedly dreamless sleep, the elderly woman was startled to hear the sound of voices.
Oh my goodness, somebody’s broke into my house!
Sitting up in bed, she realized that this was not so. But outside, somewhere
beyond the restful hush of the rushing waters, she could detect low murmurings. Malicious mutterings. But were these unsettling articulations actually
voices
? The lady cocked her ear.

It’s them damned witches again—they’ve come back!

As she had on previous occasions, Loyola strained vainly to make out the words.

Those jibber-jabbering
brujos
sound like they’re under the water.

The weary woman knew she wouldn’t get another minute of sleep.
I wish my grandson was here; I’d send Wallace out to tell his nasty friends to be quiet.
But the great oaf had been gone for . . . how long—only a day or two? Or had it been a week? Loyola could not remember. Not that Wallace’s unexplained absence surprised his grandmother. Her long and mostly unhappy experience with members of the other gender had led her to some firm conclusions.

Whenever you need a man, he’ll be somewhere else.

Where?
Either with some of his idiot men friends in a stinking saloon—or with some slut of a woman.

And when the rascal is at home, he’ll lay around watching TV, expecting a good woman to fix his meals, mend and wash his filthy clothes, and take care of him like he was a snotty-nosed five-year-old.

Even so . . .

The lonely woman sighed. Tears filled her eyes.

It would be nice to have a man around the house. A man who has a gun and knows how to use it.
It occurred to her to call the police.

A pair of salty drops rolled down her leathery cheeks.

A lot of good that’d do. After all the times I’ve had them out here for one strange thing and another they couldn’t find any trace of, they figure me for an old crank. Cops ain’t worth the dirt under their fingernails.

Loyola recalled the single exception.
Charlie Moon came out every time I called, and he never made sport of me when I told him about that big, hairy monster that looked like an ape or that thirty-foot-long purple snake with black whiskers and horns like a billy goat.
Sadly, Daisy Perika’s nephew had quit his job with the Southern Ute police and moved up north years ago to a big cattle ranch.
And I ain’t laid eyes on him since.
But wasn’t that always the way with people: the good ones go away, the no-accounts are always underfoot.

Pushing away the hand-stitched quilt, she grunted her way out of bed.
Like always, I’ll just have to take care of things myself.

Loyola stepped into a pair of tattered house slippers and shuffled over to the closet, where she selected a pea-green government-issue woolen overcoat that her late husband had brought back from the war in Europe. Pulling it on, she made up her mind.
Tonight, I’m going to go find out where they are and tell them either be quiet or I’ll get the pistol out of the closet and shoot the lot of ’em!

A reckless old soul. But courageous. Also dangerous.

By the time she opened the back-porch door, the voices had fallen silent. This was, one would imagine, fortunate. But for whom? Loyola Montoya—or those folk whose confounded mutters and murmurs had disturbed her slumbers?

It is too early to say.

But after retiring to her parlor rocking chair, the elderly lady intended to stay wide awake until that cold, gray hour that would precede a wan, yellowish dawn.

During that interval, she dozed intermittently. And fitfully.

In Loyola’s fretful dreams, malevolent witches peered through her windows.

Turned knobs on her locked doors. Whispered obscene curses.

In her dreams.

If dreams they were.

AS LOYOLA DOZES IN HER ROCKER, ANOTHER SLEEPER IS ABOUT TO EX
perience some difficulty. The character of immediate interest is Scott Parris, who happens to be a sworn officer of the law—but not one of those policemen Loyola Montoya has called for help. Parris and Loyola have, in point of fact, never met. When the harried old lady has a problem, she generally calls the Ignacio town cops or the Southern Ute tribal police. This is the proper thing to do, because Mrs. Montoya lives in a jurisdiction that is quite some distance to the south of Granite Creek, in which fair city Mr. Parris is chief of police, for all the good that does him, which isn’t that much on his best day, what with dealing with a quarter-wit DA (Bill “Pug” Bullet), a police force that would rate a tad better than run-of-the-mill were it not for a couple of cops (Eddie “Rocks” Knox and E. C. “Piggy” Slocum) who cause the boss no end of heartburn. Not that Scott Parris’s life is all bad.

He has the singular good fortune to have Charlie Moon for a friend, and the Southern Ute tribal investigator owns the Columbine Ranch, which is semifamous for its purebred Hereford stock and (of more interest to Parris) features maybe the finest alpine lake in the whole state—and Lake Jesse is unsurpassed for trout fishing. Also on the plus side is Parris’s current sweetheart (Willow Skye), who is a little more than half his age and endowed with a staggering IQ. Regarding his main squeeze, Willow is kind to animals, perpetually cheerful, also quite an eyeful from her spun-honey curls to those dainty little toes with rose-painted nails. But do not leap to conclusions. Though some members of their tribe might deny the following assertion: no woman is perfect; this young lady’s single shortcoming is a serious if not fatal flaw—Dr. Willow Skye (PhD in abnormal psychology) is determined to
improve
her boyfriend. Not that
Mr. Parris does not have acres of room for upgrading and then some, but he is happy just the way he is. But enough about couples and other plurals. Let us return to the subject of sleep.