Wife of Moon (21 page)

Christine lifted her head, her nostrils flaring for air. “T.J. said he'd gone home to get the photographs and negatives, but they weren't there. He said that Evans must have sent his people to find the evidence, so he wouldn't have to part with any of his precious money. Evans was ruthless, and whoever he'd sent had left us a message by killing Denise. T.J. said I should go and stay at the log cabin until he figured out what to do.”

“They didn't find the photos and plates,” Father John said. “They ransacked your apartment looking for them.”

“I never had them.”

“Where are they?”

“Don't you understand?” She lifted a fist and hammered against his chest. “They belonged to her. Denise! She'd kept them in the shed behind the house for years. T.J. showed them to me. If Evans didn't
get them, then she must've taken them. She must have put them somewhere else.”

They didn't know, he was thinking. Quinn and Russell didn't know where the evidence was. They had tortured and killed T.J. and searched the house. They were still looking.

Dear God. They were looking for Christine.

“Look.” He nodded toward the headlights jumping across the ground in the distance.

Everything about her seemed to freeze. She stared at the lights. “Eric!” she said a whisper, dry and breathless.

CHRISTINE TURNED ABRUPTLY
and started running toward the pickup. Her boots kicked up little dust clouds that hung in the air behind her before settling onto the ground.

Father John glanced around at the shafts of light bearing down on him, riding high. The pickup could never outdistance an SUV.

He darted through the lights. “Wait,” he shouted. The SUV's engine thrummed behind, the tires scraping the ground. “We can't outrun them.” He came up beside her and reached for her arm.

“Let me go.” She slapped his hand away and kept going.

He threw another glance over his shoulder. Still coming on. Not more than thirty yards away now, the headlights sweeping the ground between them. He caught up to Christine again, and this time he threw both arms around her shoulders, pulling her to him. “Listen to me,” he said. “Go to the cabin and lock yourself in. I'm going to get the cell and try to call the police. Do you understand?”

“Eric's here.” It came in a quick expulsion of breath. “He'll make
me come with him.” In the moonlight splashing across her face, he could see the raw, animal terror. She was breaking into pieces in his hands. “I'll kill myself first,” she said.

“Try to hold yourself together.” He gripped her shoulders hard and shook her a little in an effort to bring her back into one piece. “Run through the trees. I'll meet you at the cabin. We can bolt the door. We'll be safe there.”

He had to move her sideways to steer her into the direction of the cabin. “Go,” he shouted, nudging her forward. He followed her with his eyes for a second to make sure she was on course. Something must have snapped together in her, because she started running full out, dodging through the trees, until she was nothing more than a dark, moving shadow.

The headlights splaying around him were brighter, the engine revving up as the SUV plunged forward. The gap between them was closing. He started zigzagging toward the pickup's taillights shining red through the trees, the headlights still behind, tracking his shadow. Left. Right. He yanked open the door and swept his hand over the dashboard for the hard plastic of the cell, then spotted the glint of metal on the floor. The SUV's headlights swept over the pickup again as he grabbed the phone and pushed it into his jacket pocket.

He could hear the vehicle grind to a halt behind him as he headed into the trees, picking his way by the moonlight falling through the branches. A car door slammed, then another. Sharp cracks in the brittle air. As he veered left, he caught sight of the waving light of a flashlight skimming across the ground and, behind the light, two dark shadows.

God! Whoever they were, they would follow his tracks straight to the cabin.

He kept moving, his eyes searching for a fallen branch. There was nothing except the little mounds of underbrush. Then, blue-tinged in the moonlight ahead, a broken branch dipping to the ground, sprays of smaller branches on the end. He plunged forward, grabbed the branch
and started twisting. The bark tore into his hands. He kept twisting until, finally, the stalk broke free, almost throwing him off balance. He turned and ran back the way he'd come, a good twenty feet, then started forward again, dragging the branch behind until his tracks disappeared into a smooth carpet of pine needles, twigs, and brush.

The flashlight was bobbing to his left now but it would turn right any minute, following his own back-and-forth trail until it ended. But the smoke—God, the smoke wafted like a cloud through the trees. They would follow the smoke.

The gunshot, when it came, was like a burst of thunder, echoing through the trees, shaking the earth.

Father John dropped the branch. There was a rifle in the cabin. A rifle and Christine. He sprinted for the cabin, his heart beating in his ears. No. No. No. Dear Lord, no. Don't let it be.

He burst into the small clearing, mounted the step to the porch, and grabbed for the latch. It held fast. “Christine,” he shouted. Then he was pounding the door with both fists, muffled thuds that reverberated around him. “Christine. Christine.”

Another gunshot cracked the air, and this time he realized that it came from the trees. Father John started moving across the porch toward the sound, staying close to the wall, the logs scraping the sleeve of his jacket. He reached the corner and stopped, straining to hear the sound of footsteps, the snap of a branch under boots.

Silence.

He leaned out a couple of inches and peered around the stone chimney. Nothing but gray layers of moonlight on the ground, and beyond, the black line of the trees positioned like guards.

“Turn around, Father O'Malley.”

They were behind him. They'd come around the far side of the cabin while he'd been inching toward the chimney. He gripped the porch railing.

“It looks like I was correct in assuming that the sound of gunshots would bring you to us.” The voice was closer.

Father John pushed himself off the railing and turned around. Planted in front of the porch step, in black overcoats, were two men: Martin Quinn, with the short, narrow build of a boy; and Paul Russell, tall and beefy, looming over his boss. It was Russell who held the gun, and in Quinn's hands, a flashlight the size of a truncheon.

“Haven't you done enough for the senator?” Father John said, surprised by the calm confidence in his voice. His muscles were tense, his hands curled into fists.

“There is one more task that must be completed,” Quinn said. “And you, Father O'Malley, have lent your assistance and led us to the woman.”

“You followed me here?”

“One might say that.” A laugh gurgled out of the man. “Your assistant insisted we go to the museum and have another look at the Curtis exhibit. The woman whom you'd placed in charge after Christine Loftus made her unfortunate disappearance informed us that we had just missed you. She said you'd gone to an old log cabin looking for Christine. Naturally, we said we would like to be of help, and she was kind enough to give us the directions.”

“Christine doesn't have the photographs.” Father John didn't move.

“Is that what she tells you?” Quinn shook his head, as if he were sadly disappointed. “I suspect the photographs and negatives are hidden here—in a log cabin in no man's land.” Now the man emitted a shout of laughter, and the bulky man behind him laughed, too, mimicking his boss. The gun jumped in his hand.

“Very clever, I must admit. No one would think to look here. I'm sure that T.J. Painted Horse and Christine Loftus”—another laugh, like a grunt—“an unlikely pair of criminals, wouldn't you agree? I'm sure they convinced themselves they had found the perfect hiding place.”

“How many people are you willing to kill, Quinn?”

“The saga ends here,” the man said. “Senator Evans has lived long
enough with this Damocles sword hanging over his head, never knowing when some crazy Indian will try to blackmail him and threaten to publish photographs that would do nothing except damage the name of a very fine family and stop a good man from becoming the next president.”

“You killed Denise, didn't you? Then you waited for T.J. and killed him.”

The man shrugged and jammed his hands into his coat pockets. “Regrettable incidences, I'm afraid. There's no end of fools on the reservation. Whenever Jaime Evans decides to run for another office, Indians start thinking the Evans family owes them.” He pulled his lips back into a sneer. “Now this white woman sticks her nose into this, and we have a new equation, do we not? Now we have a white woman with connections. If the senator refuses to pay her, she would know how to do the maximum amount of damage. We can't let that happen, can we? Tell the woman inside to let you in.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Merely delaying the inevitable.” Quinn motioned to the man behind him, waving him forward. “Shoot the latch,” he said.

Russell stepped onto the porch, moved close to the door, and pointed the gun at the latch. The shock of the bullet slamming into metal and wood ran along the floorboards. The door seemed to come unhinged, swinging inward, like a gate blowing in the wind.

“Ah . . .” Quinn began, the look of satisfaction moving across the thin face.

The blast sounded like a cannon. It burst through the swinging door, splintering the wood that dropped in shards onto the floor. Then another blast, and another. Everything was moving in slow motion—an old black-and-white film reeling itself out at half speed. The bulky man lifted off his feet, blown back across the step, his head pushed into the ground. And Quinn, behind him, staring down at the other man's prone body, shock and horror replacing the satisfaction on his face.

Still another blast, this one lifting the small man into the air where
he seemed to hang a moment before crumpling backward. Blood, pooling around the bodies, ran black on the ground.

It was a moment before Christine appeared, still gripping the rifle, caressing it almost, like something that made her safe and secure.

“Eric?” She pivoted toward Father John.

“He's not here, Christine.” He had to force his gaze away from the barrel pointing at him and meet the woman's eyes. “There's no one else here.”

It took a moment for this to register, for the frozen fear in her eyes to begin to melt into comprehension. She turned toward the men at her feet, lined up one after the other, like a path leading from the porch toward the trees. “They shouldn't have come here,” she said.

Father John started toward her, his eyes riveted to the gun. His muscles felt glued together. “They were the ones in the SUV,” he said. The voice of a priest, a counselor. “Eric isn't here. You're okay.” Calm. Calm. “I'm going to take the rifle now, because you don't need it anymore.”

She seemed to tighten her grasp on the barrel, pulling it into her chest.

“You don't need the gun anymore,” he repeated. “Not anymore.” A mantra that he hoped would sound in her head.
Not anymore. Not anymore.

Was the muzzle dipping toward the floor, or was he only imagining that it was true? He waited another moment, then reached out and grabbed hold of the barrel. A second passed, two seconds—a lifetime—before he felt the barrel start to give.

He lifted the gun out of her hands. “Let's go inside.”

She stared at him a moment, then turned and walked into the cabin. He stayed behind her. Dropping onto the bench across from the door, she said, “Are they dead?”

“I think so.” Past the shattered door, across the porch, he could see the black holes gaping in the men's chests, the pools of blood widening on the ground.

“I'll be right back,” he told her. Then he went back out and walked across the porch. He leaned around and set the rifle in the dark corner between the log wall and the stone chimney.

He pulled his cell out of his jacket pocket as he came back inside. Christine was bent over, arms crossed, hugging herself and bobbing up and down. “What have I done, Father. God, what have I done?”

He straddled the bench he'd pulled out into the center of the room earlier and punched in 911, keeping his gaze on the bobbing woman. The operator—a female voice—picked up on the second ring, and he told her that he was Father O'Malley, from St. Francis Mission. Two men named Martin Quinn and Paul Russell had been shot at the old log cabin near Black Mountain. They should send cars right away.

“There's a car in the vicinity. Do you need an ambulance?”

“Yes,” he said, his eyes still on Christine. Then he told the operator to notify Gianelli.

Before he'd hit the off key, he heard the scratching noise outside. Christine had heard it, too, because she shrank backward and stiffened against the walls, as if she could disappear into the logs.

The noise stopped. The quiet seemed more intense, a noise unto itself. Then the scratching again, footsteps coming closer.

An animal, Father John thought, then dismissed the idea. The footsteps of an animal lacked the purpose, the
willed
deliberation, of the noise outside. He got up, leaned toward the woman, and whispered: “Wait here. I'll see who it is.” Then he stepped over to the shattered door and peered out into the moonlight streaming like a banner across the porch and over the prone bodies. At the end of the light, a bulky shadow bent over the lifeless head of Martin Quinn, then, coming closer, stooped to look into the face of Paul Russell.

“Well, what do we have here, Father O'Malley?” Eric Loftus stepped around the bodies and came up onto the porch.