Daniel Hecht_Cree Black 02 (32 page)

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THE MINE access road cut straight south from Highway 264 through low, rolling hills. Running parallel to the wide gravel road,
the company's rail spur was occupied by a seemingly endless train of open-topped cars heaped with coal. Cree had picked up
Joyce at the Navajo Nation Inn, and they were using the time to bring each other up to date.

Cree felt burnt, little more than a husk of ash, consumed by the flame of anger and anxiety she'd felt at the hospital. On
her way out of the building, she'd used a pay phone to call Julieta with the news about Tommy, then spent the drive from Gallup
to Window Rock trying to think. With a whirlwind of competing worries, it wasn't easy.

"I've been mostly striking out," Joyce told her. "The museum is gorgeous, but the materials there didn't tell me jack about
what might have happened at the mesa. There's lots of good stuff on Navajo spirituality and healing traditions, and the museum
proper gives a basic history of the People. But your little mesa doesn't show up."

"Crap."

"Sorry. There's tons of historical drama in the region, though. The Navajos and Apaches began migrating in about eight hundred
years ago. Of course, they found the Pueblos' ancestors already living here. For a few centuries there was the usual raiding
and feuding among Apaches, Utes, Navajos, Hopis, the whole gang, and then the Spanish came and subjugated the bejeezus out
of whoever they could lay hands on. Then the area was ceded to the United States and the Yankees began to come in, and it
all went downhill from there. The Indians resisted, natch, some more than others, some making alliances with the whites. One
of the worst problems was the trade in Indian slaves, run by the Mexicans and white Americans. At one point, one fourth of
all Navajos were slaves. The U.S. government wouldn't do anything about it, so the Dinê fought back hard. It all came to a
head around 1863, when Kit Carson was sent out to kill or round up every last Navajo. When he couldn't just shoot them, he
starved them out—burned their crops, destroyed their flocks. Most of the Navajos were brought to Fort Wingate and then were
marched three hundred miles to some hellhole on the eastern side of the state called Bosce Redondo. The Navajos call it the
Long Walk, it's one of the defining historical moments for the tribe. It was brutal, a lot of them died en route. And Bosce
Redondo was basically a concentration camp—forced labor, starvation, disease, humiliation, the whole Nazi shtick. Eventually
it begat some appropriate outrage, several federal commissions looked into the situation and found it abhorrent. So the government
felt a twinge of remorse, created the rez, and marched the survivors back in 1868."

Cree didn't answer. She just clung to the steering wheel, mourning the endless and unnecessary cruelty that human beings could
inflict on each other. The arid desert landscape was a melancholy stage upon which untold sorrows had been enacted. Like everywhere
else. All these years of self-deluding idealism, thinking she could do something about it by alleviating one small, lingering
hurt at a time. Insane. Trying to bail the ocean with an eyedropper.

Joyce noticed her sudden dive. "I did pull up some newspaper stuff on livestock mutilations, though," she went on brightly,
as if that would cheer Cree up. "Most recent local incident was a couple of years ago, that must be what Donny was talking
about. Some Navajo teenagers tracked their horses onto McCarty property, over on the far west end of their Hunters Point land?
Supposedly found the horses all . . . well, sliced up. In weird ways. Give you something to chat about with Donny M, anyway.
An icebreaker."

Cree nodded. Joyce was trying to be amusing.

Joyce bit her lower lip and then said quietly, "I'm sorry, Cree. I don't have anything sweet and nice to tell you." She turned
her face to the window and somberly regarded the passing desert. "How'd we get into this business, anyway? You know?"

"What business? The human being business?"

"I know you're worried about the boy. But we'll find him. Joseph or Julieta will have some idea how."

"Yeah." But that hope didn't cheer her.
I still have no idea who or what is in him,
she thought despondently.
I don't know if I can do my work when I'm
trying to stay ahead of an entity that's taking more control every day, not to mention child welfare investigators and eager beavers like Schaeffer looking for an unusual specimen to experiment on.

They were driving between heaps of crushed mineral material. Up ahead, Cree saw the rearing dragline boom she and Julieta
had seen from the other side. A mile or so to the east, several giant yellow machines were trundling along, dumping spoil
and putting up a drifting cloud of dust.

Joyce followed her gaze and her brow wrinkled. "We should talk about how to handle Donny, Cree. What we're going to tell him,
what we're trying to accomplish here. What's your plan?"

"Plan?" Cree snorted. "I'm going to lie through my teeth—what else?"

Two minutes later, they approached a guardhouse with striped barrier gates lowered across the road. Just this side of it,
Donny McCarty sat on the hood of a massive black SUV. With him was a large man with a boyish, pug-nosed face and the build
of a weight lifter. As they pulled over, the two men left the truck and approached them.

Cree turned off the car, got out, and introduced Joyce as her associate; Donny introduced the big man as Nick Stephanovic, his "aide-de-camp."

"That's 'gofer' in English," Nick said amiably. Closer to him, Cree felt a glow of menace behind the bearish good humor and
for an instant wondered irrationally whether they had anything to worry about from Donny or his sidekick today.

"And what's your role in your firm, Ms. Wu?" Donny asked Joyce.

"Business manager," Joyce said. "And historical investigator, medic, um, devil's advocate, and all-round utility drone. That's
English for gofer, too."

Donny nodded with a sour expression that made it clear he wasn't planning to share anyone's attempts at conviviality.

"We're very grateful for your meeting us," Cree said. "Not too many CEOs would make time to show a stranger around. Especially
such a, well,
strange
stranger."

Nick chuckled and explained cheerfully, "McCarty Energy has a longstanding policy of public accessibility and accountability."

Donny didn't share his assistant's mood. He struck Cree as preoccupied and suspicious, a man just going through the motions.
"I have only an hour to spare for this, so I'd like to get started. What's our agenda? Forgive me if I'm unfamiliar with the
concerns of a parapsychologist."

"Well, we had talked about the mutilations—"

"We can take you to the area where we found 'em, but I can't promise you'll see anything of interest. I can't even guarantee
we'll find the exact spot again. Even the bones are probably long gone. Coyotes drag 'em around."

Nick Stephanovic nodded.

"I have to be frank, Mr. McCarty," Cree began uneasily. "Since we last met, I've heard some interesting supernatural gossip.
This will sound strange, but a couple of staffers at the school mentioned a rumor of a ghost here at the mine. I guess they
had worked here, or had relatives who had worked here, and—"

"Oh, yeah? And who would that be? I have something of a photographic memory for some things, including my employees' names."

"You know, I can't remember. Sorry, the Navajo names are so unfamiliar to me—"

"Probably a Begay or a Nez," Nick put in helpfully. "Every other Navajo is a Begay."

"I think that was it," Cree said. "Yes."

The two men exchanged glances, and Cree got the feeling she was fooling no one.

"So we've got a ghost here at the mine—" Donny prompted.

"I told you this would sound odd . . . but they say your father died here three years ago, and someone said it was his ghost.
I hoped I might visit the site of his death. I wanted to see if I could . . . make contact with him. As long as I was here
anyway." She hesitated, trying to gauge his reaction. "Of course, if this is difficult for you, I completely understand. I
don't mean to sound insensitive to your loss—"

"My father," Donny said drily, "was not the type to inspire much sentimentality among his survivors."

He said it with such deliberate understatement, such a hard light in his eyes, that Cree couldn't come up with a reply. Even
Nick Stephanovic uneasily hitched a shoulder.

"You know," Joyce put in brightly, as if it had just occurred to her, "I was thinking that, given the limits on our time,
maybe we should split up. Why don't I go look at the mutilation site, Cree, and you and Mr. McCarty go where . . . wherever
you need to? If Mr. Stephanovic would be kind enough to take me." She turned a sweet smile on the big man.

Donny caught Nick's eyes, thought about it, and shrugged. "Why not," he said.

They took Donny's Lincoln Navigator through a maze of wide gravel roads that wound between heaps of soil and rock and past
lumbering earthmovers, ending up at the office complex Cree had seen that first day with Julieta. At the main parking lot,
Joyce and Nick bailed out and got into one of the rugged company Jeeps. Joyce brought her shoulder pack containing some basic
equipment Ed had suggested would be typical for a mutilation site, given the supposed UFO connection: a Geiger counter, latex
gloves, a soil scoop and a dozen plastic sample containers, a digital camera—enough for the charade they were putting on,
anyway. Cree waved good-bye to her from the window of Donny's Lincoln, feeling a little trepidation at letting her go with
the bearish hulk. Then, thinking about it, she decided that Nick Stephanovic might be one tough bastard, but if it came to
any rough-and-tumble, she'd put her money on Joyce every time.

Donny drove east along the valley, passing deep trenches with striated cliffs, then up a winding ramp to the higher land on
the north side. At one point he stopped and rolled down Cree's window.

"You can get some idea of the scope of operations from here. Quite a sight, isn't it?"

It was. From their position Cree could see a huge expanse of land, scattered with mountains of earth in pastel reds and grays,
cut with meandering ramps and roads. A deep gash, half a mile long and several hundred yards wide, was obviously one of the
working pits. Visible through the dust haze at its far end, a dragline swung a bucket the size of a house and let go an avalanche.
The boom alone, Donny told her, was the length of a football field, the dirty-orange motor house at its base was six stories
tall, its vertical mast another eight above that. Other machines came and went like ponderous prehistoric animals, filling
the air with the rumble of engines and the stink of dust and diesel.

Cree startled as a broad ridge of ground about a mile away suddenly rose in a hump, as if the land were alive and flexing
muscle. In another instant, a line of geysers blew soil and rock skyward in a rolling wave of explosions that swept across
an area a quarter mile square. The sound of thunder hit the truck before the last of it had blown. In another moment, the
area was hidden in a pall of downward-sifting dust and rubble.

"We call it 'shooting,'" Donny explained. "The shooters—the explosives guys—drill holes down to the first coal seam, fill
'em with TNT. Setting the charges off in sequence that way helps chase the shock wave. Cracks up the overburden so the big
Cats can scrape it off, expose the coal." He watched with satisfaction as the dust cloud thinned and drifted away.

"It's very . . . impressive. Must be dangerous."

"That's coal mining," he agreed with some macho pride. But then he said coldly, as if she'd accused him, "McCarty Energy has
one of the best safety records in the industry."

Donny rolled up her window and continued driving. In another moment, he steered the Jeep into a descending ramp that led into
a long, flat-bottomed trench hacked into the rock.

"Not that I'm buying into any of this," he said, "but how the hell are you supposed to go to the site of an alleged haunting
when the site isn't there anymore? I mean, the general area is just up ahead. But the ground he fell on has been stripped
away, the pit floor is about thirty feet below that level now. The spoil's been taken away to fill in other mined-out pits.
The coal has long since been sent to power plants in Colorado. The dragline he fell off of has moved to a new pit a mile and
a half west. So where's the site? Where's your ghost?"

"I don't know," Cree admitted. If there was a ghost here, she was thinking, it would sure put Ed's geomagnetic theory to a
stern test. But then it occurred to her that maybe the unusual circumstances here—the literal disappearance of the material
place of Garrett's death—could have been the trigger that set his perseverating energies wandering.

"But," she went on, "there's plenty of historical precedent for haunted mines—shaft mines, anyway—that offer some of the
same theoretical problems. And quite often when a house that's haunted is torn down, the empty lot or a new building that's
put up will inherit the entity."

Donny blew out a skeptical breath and turned his attention to driving. Again she puzzled at her sense that he was indulging
her, just playing along, waiting her out.

"Really, I only need a few minutes here, and then we can move on to the dragline. In the meantime, you can help me by telling
me about your father. What kind of person he was. How he talked, how—"

"And how's all that supposed to help you?"

"There are many schools of parapsychological research. My approach is more psychological and intuitive than most. Knowing
more about his personality will help me recognize him if I encounter him. The idea that ghosts always appear as visible phantoms
is completely false. I usually don't really 'see' a ghost so much as 'become' a ghost, so that inner . . . feeling or quality
of character is often the only way I can identify a revenant."

Donny grunted and abruptly pulled the Lincoln to a stop. "Well, good luck. Because this is it." He shut the engine down and
glared at Cree, a challenge. He seemed to be struggling with a ticlike gulping movement, as if he had something stuck in his
throat.