Stormwalker (3 page)

I’d spent the rest of the night heaving out my guts into the waiting toilet in my cell. Now my head pounded, and my eyes were dry. The drunk had looked much better than I had when the on-duty deputy came to escort me to an interrogation room.

“Born in Many Farms,” Nash droned. “Father a Navajo, mother—no record. Her name?”

“I don’t know.”

That was true. My mother didn’t have a name. The woman she’d possessed to seduce my poor, kindly father, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, must have had a name, but she’d refused to tell it. The name on my birth certificate said “Jane Doe.” I’d never lived that down. Among my people, not knowing your mother’s family or clan was a handicap. To my grandmother, it was anathema.

“Graduated from high school in spite of frequent disciplinary problems,” Nash went on. “Attended NAU for a while.”

“None of this is a crime,” I said. I’d enjoyed my time studying art at NAU, far enough from home to feel independent but in the shadow of mountains still sacred to the Navajo.

Nash ignored me. “Arrested twice for being disorderly—once in a bar in Flagstaff, once in Albuquerque.” He flipped over a page. “Caught shoplifting, in Gallup this time.”

“A bottle of Tylenol when I was ten.” I made myself lift my head and instantly regretted it. “For my grandmother. I thought that had been wiped off my record.” I knew now what I hadn’t known then, that when we’d been attacked on that dark road from Window Rock, my mother had instigated it. My grandmother and father had fought what I’d thought were gang boys who attacked us when we stopped on a lonely stretch of road. The demons had eventually run off, but my grandmother, though physically unhurt, had been in excruciating pain. Headache from magic, I realized now. When we’d stopped for gas in Gallup, I’d swiped a small bottle of Tylenol from the convenience store inside. I’d been caught, of course, and the police called. My grandmother had been furious and made me give the store owner a cringing apology. He’d been touched by my tear-streaked contrition, far more than my grandmother had, and hadn’t pressed charges. My grandmother, on the other hand, had whacked me across the backside and never let me hear the end of it.

“I talked to the tribal police this morning,” Nash said. “They know many things about you, not all of it official. You were a troublemaker, they said, even burned down a school building. I’m surprised you’re not in prison.”

I laid my head down, willed my roiling stomach to calm. “The sins of a frustrated youth. I’m a grown-up now.”

Nash closed the folder and looked at me with his cold gray eyes. A person might think that Nash Jones was as hard as he was because of the tragedy of his missing girlfriend. But Fremont, my font of county gossip, told me that Nash had never been a sweet man. Getting shipped out to Iraq hadn’t improved things, and he’d been in a building in Baghdad when several bombs went off inside it. The building had collapsed on him and his squad, and no one had made it out but him.

This morning, he’d obviously slept, showered, shaved, and dressed in clean clothes, every crease in his uniform sharp. The perfect sheriff, was Nash. Like he’d studied it in a book, trying to pin down the character he was supposed to play. It was as though he knew what he was supposed to do and went through the motions, but some part of him just couldn’t make it work.

I was still sweaty and gritty from the wreck and my subsequent night in jail. The faucet in my cell had given up only a trickle of water, barely enough to rinse my face. The water had been clean for washing out my mouth, but its metallic taste left me feeling like I’d gargled acid.

Result: Nash was clean and rested, while I looked and felt like shit.

“Who called in the accident?” I asked groggily.

“What?”

“My cell phone broke, and there was no one on the road. How did you know there’d been an accident? Or are you clairvoyant?”

He gave me an Unbeliever scowl. “That drifter who calls himself Coyote. He saw.”

I’d never met the guy. “Maybe he can corroborate my story.”

“He was walking from Magellan and saw the flipped truck. He didn’t witness the accident itself.”

Damn. “Why didn’t he stick around?”

“He never does. But I’ll find him and question him.”

I was certain he would. Nash Jones was a thorough guy.

He reached into a shallow box next to him, took out the silver spell ball, and rolled it onto the folder. “What is this for?”

I glanced at it. “It’s a ball bearing.”

“No it isn’t. It’s too light. I asked you, what is it for? What’s it part of?”

“Something off my motorcycle.”

“Try again.”

“All right. None of your business.”

Nash turned the ball around and around in his fingers. “Is it part of a weapon? Or a way to transport drugs?”

My head pounded. “You have drugs on the brain. All right, it’s part of a weapon—a mystical, magical weapon. Give it here, and I’ll show you.”

The way I felt, I doubted I could ignite a match, but wouldn’t it be fun to activate the light spell and give him a scare? Of course, if I saw that much light right now, I might personally die, but it wouldn’t hurt anyone else.

“I’ll just hang on to it.”

As Nash started to set it down, a needlelike spark arced between his thumb and the ball. I held my breath, but nothing happened. Nash didn’t notice the spark, but the pulse of the spell beat at the inside of my skull.

Nash dropped the spell ball back into the box, then leaned toward me like a sergeant dressing down a raw recruit. “Listen to me, Begay. I know you fed McGuire a load of crap, playing on his grief, telling him you can find his daughter with your psychic abilities. But let me tell you, if you try to scam any more money out of him with your bullshit, I will kick your ass all the way back to the reservation and make sure you stay on it for the rest of your life. Got it?”

I didn’t make the mistake of raising my head again, leaving it on the cool tabletop. But he pissed me off. I hated white people who called the Navajo Nation “the reservation,” and I was just as free as he was to come and go as I pleased. “I don’t charge to investigate anything; I’m doing it as a favor. And it’s not illegal to renovate a hotel or ask questions about a missing woman. I told Chief McGuire I couldn’t guarantee that I’d find his daughter. I only told him I’d try.”

“Reckless endangerment
is
illegal. A man is dead after you ran your motorcycle into the back of his truck.”

“I didn’t hit him, I keep telling you. Check the skid marks.”

“My deputies are out there right now, trust me. If they find one thing that doesn’t add up, I’ll bust your ass so hard you’ll never get up again. You’ll pay and pay for killing my cousin.”

I forced my head off the table. “You are one angry man, you know that? I’m sorry about your cousin, I really am, but I never touched his truck. It’s not my fault your girlfriend disappeared. I’d think you’d at least let me try to find her, that you’d want to
help
me try to find her.”

“I’m not McGuire, and I don’t want to hear your false promises about your woo-woo investigating. Amy’s dead. I know that.”

“How do you know?”

His stare burned all the way to the back of my skull. “I just know.”

Nash Jones had been both suspect number one and the biggest pain in the ass to the investigation when Amy first went missing. Chief McGuire had never actually said that, but I could interpret. Nash admitted to having episodes of PTSD since returning from Iraq, and even to having one the day Amy vanished. He’d apparently gotten into his car and driven all the way to Albuquerque and had a meal, not remembering any of it. But even with this, McGuire concluded that Nash Jones truly had no idea what happened to Amy.

The police file on Amy was pretty sparse. Nice girl, lived alone in a decent neighborhood, sang in the church choir, volunteered at the library, enjoyed gardening. No enemies—everyone professed to liking Amy. Last seen at ten in the morning on a Saturday, one year ago, watering her plants. No report of an unfamiliar vehicle in the neighborhood, no report of strangers. Amy had lived at the end of a road with no outlet, and her neighbors had not noted anyone going in or out that day.

McGuire had asked the state DPS special investigations unit to step in, since both he and Jones had close ties to the missing woman. Every single conventional method of tracking down Amy had been utilized. After a year of nothing, the McGuires decided to try unconventional methods, namely me. I’d had success solving seemingly inexplicable crimes such as one I’d done in Flagstaff, where a murdered man’s shade had pointed me to evidence that told me his business partner killed him. The McGuires had invited me to Magellan to determine whether something magical hadn’t carried off their daughter. People believed such things in Magellan, and I knew that where my mother was concerned, anything was possible.

“Why the hotel?” Nash asked.

“What?” I looked up at him. Nash had his arms folded on the table, which made his biceps bulge in his uniform shirt.

“You came to Magellan because Chief McGuire thinks you’re psychic. Why buy the hotel?”

I shrugged, which hurt. “Why not?”

“It’s been derelict for fifty years.”

I couldn’t explain that the place had called to me. When I’d looked at the empty three-story square building, its windows broken and dark, something in it had spoken to me. The hotel reminded me of myself, sitting off to the side, alone and unwanted. It was also the perfect base of operations from which I could conduct my investigation and a fortified stronghold to keep my mother from simply sending along her skinwalkers to drag me to her.

“I thought the people of Magellan might like me better if I was doing something besides asking questions,” I said. “Anyway, I’m giving jobs to a lot of locals.”

“Where did you get the money?”

“That’s really none of your business.”

“Everything in Hopi County is my business.”

I was getting that idea. “I take photographs and sell them. In art galleries, from California to Santa Fe. They’re popular.”

“I’ve seen them.”

From the grim line to Nash’s mouth, I surmised that he either disapproved of my talent or flat-out didn’t like the pictures—studies of landscape or portraits of Native Americans living their lives. Probably both.

“So I won’t give you one for Christmas,” I said. “When can I go home?”

“When my deputies are finished with the accident scene. Then we’ll go see the magistrate.”

“I want a lawyer.”

“The public defender will meet you before we go to the courthouse.”

I rested my forehead on the table. “How did you get to be sheriff when you have PTSD?”

I knew I shouldn’t have asked such a dangerous question, but I didn’t have the energy to care.

“Because I do the job better than anyone else,” Nash answered. I believed him, somehow. “I haven’t had an episode in a year.”

“Not since Amy.”

As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I knew I’d just blown any chance of getting out of here today. I peeled open my eyes and looked up, wincing when I saw Nash’s gray ones.

“You give up this so-called investigation and go home,” he said in a hard voice, “or I’ll bust you for fraud and expose you for the con artist you are.”

I started to answer that I had the right to live in any town I wanted to, but my stomach decided just then to punish me for the night of storm magic. I pressed my arm over my abdomen, but it didn’t help.

I staggered to my feet and made it to the trash can in the corner before my morning coffee and a gob of bile came up.

“Damn it, Begay—”

Nash’s diatribe was cut off by a deputy outside saying quickly and worriedly, “You can’t go in there.”

The door banged open, and a man shouldered his way in, shoving aside the deputy who tried to get in his way. He was six-feet-six of solid muscle in jeans, a black T-shirt, and motorcycle boots, had a silver earring dangling from one ear, and dragon tattoos snaking down both arms. His hair was black, the wild curls of it just contained in a ponytail. He had the bluest eyes I’d ever seen, and I vividly recalled staring into them the night I lost my virginity.

My mouth formed the name, “Mick,” at the same time Nash rose to his feet and aimed his nine-millimeter right at Mick’s head.

“Stop.”

Nash might as well have tried to stop a freight train. Mick came on.

“I said,
stop
.”

Nash’s voice was ice-hard. He might have scared the hell out of insurgents in Iraq, but he didn’t know Mick. Mick ignored him, and Nash fired.

The sound exploded in my head. I screamed. The bullet hit Mick in the shoulder, and he grunted with the impact, but it barely slowed him down. He made it to me and scooped me up.

“Hey, baby,” he said, grinning. “Miss me?”