That would mean another night alone, in the dark.
He closed his eyes briefly, opened them again, and the lids felt like sandpaper scraping the surfaces of his corneas.
Not another night alone.
Cody had known fear before, but never like this. Yet something drove him forward, and kept his foot hammered down on the gas, and kept him on this lonely stretch of nothing with an armful of roses and a bag of twisting scorpions at his side.
Dan knew there was good reason to be afraid. His moment of truth would arrive very soon. It seemed that his entire life had led him to this moment. And when the moment was gone, his life would change forever.
One way, or another.
Flying above the Jeep, the Crow knew this to be true.
The Crow knew everything.
The desert wind blasted over the windshield and combed the wild tangle of Cody’s black hair. Except for a white slash of scar tissue that tore across one dark eyebrow, his face was a series of sharp angles tanned by the desert sun.
When
Dan was a teenager, strangers had said that his was a handsome face.
People who knew Dan had said something else.
But Dan wasn’t the kind to care what other people said. He’d been doing hard time since leaving the last in a long series of foster homes at the age of sixteen. Since that time he’d added the scar over his eyebrow—or, more precisely, another man had added it for him.
Dan had a couple dozen other scars that weren’t so visible.
Some of those scars had been inflicted by women.
Some of the scars you couldn’t see at all, unless you knew what you were looking for.
It was the same way with Dan’s Jeep, which had been doing hard time right along with its driver. It wasn’t much to look at, and it didn’t have a lot of extras. Mostly, what it had was 345,000 miles on the odometer. What it didn’t have was a passenger seat.
Until recently, Dan Cody had never really seen the need for one. He’d always defined a passenger as nothing more than a liability with a pulse. So where a passenger seat should have been, Dan stored a couple boxes of books—Cormac McCarthy and Elmer Kelton, Jim Thompson and Stephen Crane—and an eclectic collection of cassette tapes that comprised a soundtrack to live by. The Old 97’s and Calexico, Johnny Cash and Ennio Morricone and Curse of Horseflesh.
There were other things in the Jeep, as well. A duffle filled with Dan’s clothes. A sleeping bag, and a tent designed for a single person. Camping supplies—one knife, one fork, one spoon, one cup. Food . . . enough for one person.
A Colt Double Eagle Mark II pistol was wedged under the driver’s seat, and a Winchester Model 97 shotgun lay in the rear bed.
After all, this was the Wild West, and a man alone couldn’t be too careful.
Another silent mile and the Jeep’s headlight shone on a dented road sign with shotgun blasts for punctuation:
SCORPION FLATS
POPULATION: 43
Hard bricks of tension walled Dan’s body: the back of his neck a twisted spire, his shoulders the warped foundation.
Keep driving,
he told himself
Keep driving.
Bleached light ripped through the holes in the sign and rushed on into the black night, branding the outstretched wings of the Crow as it circled and swooped low.
In a single wingbeat, the Jeep roared past the road sign and a dozen trickles of illumination were severed in rusted holes, leaving the sign—and the bird—to darkness.
A sharp blade of fear carved the confidence of both man and bird.
What lay ahead for both would not be easy.
But it wasn’t far now.
A hundred yards, as the Crow flies . . .
Black-eyed and cloaked in midnight, the bird saw the Jeep’s brakelights flare. The vehicle slowed as it entered a little shitsplat of a town and banged off the highway into a parking lot.
Set back from the lot were gas pumps and a squat adobe, its tan walls painted turquoise and Indian paintbrush orange by the glowing neon sign above the door:
SPIRIT SONG TRADING POST
Below were other signs, hand-painted and posted in the windows:
AUTHENTIC NATIVE AMERICAN GIFTS, HANDICRAFTS, ART, SOUVENIRS, FOOD AND GAS.
A glance at the gas gauge needle told Dan Cody that it hung far south of empty. But maybe he wouldn’t need any gas. The way Cody saw it, he’d reached his destination. This was the end of the road he’d been traveling for a long, long time.
He had nowhere else to go. He killed the engine before he could change his mind, set the emergency brake, and stepped out of the battered Jeep. He took a few steps, listening to the unexpectedly
lonesome sound of crunching gravel beneath his work boots.
Second thoughts. Dan didn’t usually have them. But he was having them tonight.
He stopped at the front end of the Jeep and stared at the building. He listened to the subtle little
pings
of the cooling radiator. The light desert wind whistled off the desert and dried the sweat on his hands, cooled the back of his khaki-colored T-shirt. The wind lifted the edges of the canvas awning that ran around the flat tiled roof of the trading post, and painted eagle feathers soared on the canvas sky as if they were taking flight.
Suddenly cold, Dan grabbed his coat and slipped it on.
It was late. No lights on inside the little adobe. The building looked deserted.
Maybe the woman had closed shop for the night, tired of waiting for one last tourist to gas up.
Or maybe she was just tired of waiting for Dan Cody. Yeah, maybe that’s the way it was. And maybe Dan should leave now, pretend he’d never come here at all. Drive back down that old highway he knew so well, back to the place where the picture of the dead girl with the blue eyes smiled into the darkness, her smile a firefly spark in the moonlight.
Forget about the woman with blue eyes like the girl’s.
Forget about the roses and the scorpions.
Yeah, and forget about living,
he told himself
Just go ahead and goddamn die.
No. The woman was inside the trading post. Dan couldn’t see her through the shadowy glass, but he could feel her presence.
Somewhere in the distance, the Crow cawed.
Help me out,
Dan thought
.
Caw once for yes. Twice for no.
But the Crow didn’t make another sound. It wasn’t giving advice to anyone.
Not yet.
Behind the windows of the Spirit Song Trading Post, three people watched Dan Cody as he stood by his Jeep, fifty feet away.
“That him.” said the man called Johnny Church.
Statement, not a question.
“Yes,” Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin said, and it seemed to her that with a single word she had determined Dan Cody’s fate.
Leticia closed her eyes, tried not to let the heat that pricked behind her sockets become an uncontrolled brush fire of tears. She couldn’t let the strangers see her cry. They would use her tears against her. She did not know how they would do that, but they would.
And then Dan Cody would die.
And there’d be no one to blame but Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin.
“I knew that cowboy was your boyfriend.” Church struck an exultant fist dead center to his left palm. “Fuckin’ knew it, ’cause he looks just like your type—one hundred percent
shitkicker.”
Church talked like he looked; a muscular bullet-headed bastard with a clipped military haircut, a band T-shirt, and a black leather biker jacket that smelled like he’d slept in it the last two months. To Leticia, the man looked like a Halloween costume come to life—a black leather Frankenstein with brands and tattoos instead of stitches, piercings instead of metal bolts and clamps ... a man cobbled together from personal nightmares.
“Can I tell ’em or can I tell ’em, babe?” Church called to a darkhaired woman who stood behind a display of beautifully feathered kachina dolls.
The woman didn’t say anything. Not yet. Above her head, in the half-dark, was a birch bark sign carved with the words:
Awanyanka Ina Make.
In the Crow language, the words meant: Protect Mother Earth.
Leticia had carved the sign herself, with a knife very much like the ones that rested on the shelves of the display cabinet behind the counter. Mountain Clan Crow knives in leather sheathes tanned to a dull sheen with willow bark and birch oil. Curved steel blades honed to wicked killing edges that could carve through flesh with the same ease a fish slices through cold mountain water.
“Asked you a question, Kyra,” the man said. “Can I tell ’em or can I—?”
“Oh, you can
tell ’em,
Johnny,” the woman replied in a low, teas
ing voice that was less a sound than a slither of snakes down Leticia’s spine.
“Damn straight I can,” Johnny Church said.
Aged hardwood floorboards groaned in protest as the woman walked the store’s aisles. Her hands brushed through racks of fringed doeskin jackets. Her fingers whispered across braided com husk and sweet grass baskets . . . and glided over porcupine quill boxes . . . and lingered sensuously on the curved secrets of soapstone carvings.
Her black nails scratched across incised patterns on Hopi clay pottery.
Leticia’s anger flared. She wanted to tell the goth bitch:
Get your deadwhite hands off my people’s art.
Johnny Church had called the woman Kyra. Leticia hadn’t heard a last name. She didn’t need to. She doubted either intruder went by the name they were born with. They were the kind of people who erected their own personae, barbed wire walls around bloodless hearts.
Kyra made her way from the back of the trading post to the front window. Of course, she was dressed in black. Black leather jacket, black shirt, black pants. Her face was heroin-chic angular, painted with care, the pale skin drawn too tightly over model-high cheekbones brushed with silver glitter. Her hair was long and luminous, with a crimson-black sheen that looked wet in the moonlight, like a reflection on a puddle of blood. A chain circled her neck— small chromed links, twisted round and round, coiled tightly like a silver snake bent on strangling her.
Though she hated herself for it, Leticia had to admit that the junkie-thin woman scared her a lot more than the man with the powerful biceps and broad shoulders. Of the two, she was obviously the one in control. Anyone could see that. Even a dead man.
But Leticia kept her eyes fixed on Johnny Church. He was the one with the weapons. The weapons Leticia could see, anyway. And he was standing right in front of her, an ugly, unavoidable fact of life.
“This doesn’t have to happen,” Leticia said. “It’s not too late. Just let me talk to Dan. He’ll leave.”
“Fuck that.”
“Then let me lock the door. If he can’t get in, he can’t cause any trouble. He doesn’t know for sure that I’m here, and he hasn’t seen me. He’ll think I’ve closed up, gone home early—”
Church spat laughter. “Do you really expect me to believe a locked door is going to stop someone like that?”
Church gestured at Dan Cody, still standing beside his Jeep. Still staring into the dark eye of the adobe’s front window.
That window was threaded with dream catchers, red willow hoops webbed with nettlestalk cord dyed red with bloodroot and wild inner plum bark. The dream catchers, which traditionally were suspended from a child’s cradle board, were good luck charms of a sort, said to trap evil forces. But to Leticia, staring at Dan through slashes of blood-red cord, the dream catchers looked more like the crosshairs of a shotgun.
“Why the hell is he just standing there?” Church demanded. “Why doesn’t he come in?”
Leticia didn’t answer.
Dan, don't come in here, sweetheart,
she thought
.
Bad fucking medicine. Stay away.
Church swiveled neatly and stared straight into the depths of Leticia’s blue, blue eyes. He raised a .357 Magnum vertically until the barrel was parallel to his hard chiseled features. “I’ll ask you one more time,” he said. “What’s the cowboy waiting for?”
“I told you, I don’t
know.”
“I’m not going to kill him, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Church said.
“Believe
me. The
last
thing I want is another man’s blood on my hands. Murder’s bad karma . . . the kind of shit that gets you in serious trouble with the watchdogs of eternity, and then you end up spending your next life as some penance-chasing nohope who wipes the asses of lepers or something. No fuckin’ thanks. That ain’t for Johnny Church.”
The big man lowered the .357 and smiled. Slowly, fully, as if coldly amused. He had a perfect smile, and he knew it. But his perfect smile did nothing to put Leticia at ease. The stranger’s eyes were pale and cold and gray as the dead side of the moon.
“Didn’t mean to get all metaphysical on you, Pocahontas,”
Church said, and then he turned to Kyra. “I can’t fuckin’ take this, Ky. You think this cowboy knows what’s going on? You think maybe a little bird told him?”