Tribal Ways (11 page)

For a moment everything stopped dead.

“Did I do right?” Two Hatchets asked, blinking, in a mosquito whine. “Did I? I’m off the hook, right? Right?”

Then all hell broke loose as someone shouted, “It’s a trap!”

Guns began to strobe in the meeting hall with a cataclysmic multivoiced roar. One of the first shots hit Two Hatchets in the left temple. The little informant fell on his face on the floor.

The sound of multiple guns firing at once reverberated between the bare concrete floors and ceiling. Annja saw a bullet explode a lantern on a table. Liquid fuel sprayed over a man standing nearby, probably a Dog Soldier by his placement. Hideous light flared as he tottered, blazing, out of Annja’s view, waving his arms and shrieking.

Men were struggling. Bright gun flashes made the hellish scene more so. The smell of burning hair and skin made Annja’s eyes water, stung her nose and made her stomach churn.

It all happened in a matter of seconds. She heard the Latino leader hollering about betrayal in Spanish. He was suddenly cut off.

Time to go, Annja thought.

As she turned, rough hands clamped on her arms. Two huge men loomed right behind her. The light of various fires glistened on the paint that obscured their faces, and gleamed on the enamel of teeth bared in feral smiles.

“Oh,
no!
” she gasped, as melodramatically as possible. She slumped dead weight toward the floor.

The Dog soldiers were strong men with strong hands. But they weren’t prepared for Annja’s sudden boneless, sobbing, whimpering slump. She pulled free and dropped to her knees on the coldly merciless concrete.

“Please,” she whined. “Please don’t kill me! I’m a journalist!
Please.
”

The men hesitated for just a moment, then one said, “We plan to make an example of you.”

Annja concentrated hard as she summoned the sword. As the closer man lunged for her she slashed his legs.

He reared back, flinched and toppled sideways against his partner. The other man yelped like a dog with its tail stepped on and pushed him away as his legs gushed blood across the jumbled furniture, the floor, even the wall.

The other Dog turned back toward Annja, legs braced, raising a hatchet over his head. “I’ll fix you,” he shouted.

“I think not,” Annja said, and thrust the sword into his chest.

She released the hilt. The sword vanished.

The Dog Soldier uttered a gurgling scream and collapsed.

She looked back to the big room. The men were all fighting one another.

All around her men shouted in fury, fear and pain. Whether any or all of the Dog Soldiers’ invited guests had believed they’d been lured into a trap, once guns came out it was every radical for himself.

Annja ran. Wheeling right she darted down the corridor. Ahead of her the passageway ended in a space expanding to her left, with a large plywood-covered window beyond. She cut left at an angle across the open space, the size of a largish room, to a corridor she thought led toward an exit from the rear of the central building.

As she passed the black mouth of another cross-corridor to her left, a white light speared from the direction of the exit and nailed her. Her eyes dazzled; she hurled herself left, letting herself leave her feet. A dive into the dark unknown was preferable to what she knew she was otherwise about to receive.

From the corner of her eye she saw the blue-white spot illuminating the red-bearded white radical. He was supporting his taller dreadlocked comrade, who appeared to be wearing a red Raggedy Ann wig over a bloody mask. Then Annja was out of the line of fire, as shatteringly loud gunshots erupted from down the hallway.

She landed hard, cracked her chin, slid along the floor with bright lights flashing through her brain that had nothing to do with the full-auto muzzle flashes dancing at her back. That brilliant beam, she’d instantly known, came from a ballistic flashlight clamped to the barrel of an assault rifle—a CAR-4, judging by the horrific racket it made. The shooter had presumably illuminated his target as much to make sure he wasn’t about to light up some of his own guys as for help aiming. The fractional-second pause as he processed what he saw had given Annja her life.

At least for the present. Despite the pain hammering through jaw and head she forced herself to snap back to her feet and drive on. Behind her, somebody seemed to be shooting back at the man with the CAR, presumably a Dog Soldier, guarding the exit.

She ran into the front-to-rear corridor on the wing’s far side. Instantly a couple of male bodies jostled her. Somebody cursed. There was a flash so close she felt the hot slap of the blast. Tiny fragments of unburned propellant stung her neck.

The muzzle flame illuminated the upper torso and strained dark face of a man in a dark quasi uniform. She was sure it wasn’t one of the three radicals who’d been negotiating with the Dogs. Probably a bodyguard.

He had opened fire on her. She made the sword appear in her hand, hacked compactly left and right. She felt the steel bite. Heard screams.

As bodies thudded against either wall of the passageway Annja ran on. In a few steps a plywood-covered floor-to-ceiling window loomed on her left.

Annja pulled up short. Turning, she slashed a quick X through the wet, resistant wood. As she’d feared, it made a loud squealing noise. But at this point a little more noise seemed unlikely to make a bit of difference. She could barely hear it for the ringing in her ears.

Shoulder first she threw herself at the thin wooden sheet. It gave way, though it grasped at her with jagged damp claws. She stumbled out into bracingly cold, blessedly clean-smelling air.

Sword still in hand, she took quick stock of her situation. She stood on a patch of grass in a recess between the central wing and the northernmost one. Hugging the main building’s wall she crouched. It was scarcely less black outside than inside; she had a good chance of escaping detection even if somebody outside the recess looked directly at her.

From the tumult of screams and shooting the mobile melee seemed to be rolling north toward where the visitors, and maybe the Dog Soldiers themselves, had presumably parked their vehicles. Shouts drew her attention back to the opening east of her. Two men appeared, running from the south. As one raced onward with the flopping high-swinging gait of sheer panic, the other, a tall, spare man with a bandanna tied around his forehead, stopped, turned and opened fire with a handgun.

A moment later a pair of unmistakable Dog Soldiers dashed out in pursuit.

Annja stayed hunkered down where she was. The commotion continued to the north of her. She heard shots that clearly came from outside on the far side of the buildings, the west. She guessed the delegates to the abortive war conference had more guards stationed out by their cars. They were now presumably shooting it out with their hosts.

After five deep deliberate breaths she decided to make a break.

Quickly she duckwalked to the corner, did three-second looks left and right. No one. As she started forward, she saw a revolver, a Smith & Wesson N-frame, on the ground.

Without hesitation or pause she bent to scoop it up as she ran for the rolling terrain east of the training center. The big Magnum might not be an ideal choice for follow-up shots, but Annja had no fear of its noise or recoil. If she found herself having to shoot, she’d get to cover or drop to the ground, aim and make the last rounds count.

If there are any rounds, she thought. She wasn’t about to stop and swing open the cylinder to check, either. Nor was she going to crack the piece open on the run and risk the low-comedy catastrophe of spilling out however many live cartridges remained.

Instead, she pelted flat out across the pavement, vaulted the drainage ditch and was gone with the wind.

Ranging wide to the east before turning north to where her rental car waited, she hoped, undiscovered and unmolested at the rear of the dead mall, Annja had plenty of time to consider what had just happened—and to parse through her options.

She had witnessed an abortive attempt at coordinating terror strikes by terrorist groups from across the U.S. That these particular bands, or their survivors back at their home bases, weren’t likely to want to collaborate with the Dog Soldiers did not mean that other groups hadn’t already met and made terms. And that familiar voice had made clear that the Dog Society plotted something big—and soon.

Try as she could Annja could not dredge up a face or name to go with that voice. She gave up the effort quickly; she had too much else to think about.

It was cold. Indeed, the wind literally seemed to be sucking the very life from her out through her jacket. She was coming down from an adrenaline jag, which made her knees wobbly and set nausea seething in her stomach. But that was nothing she wasn’t used to. She kept her legs moving by force of will, as she allocated at least some of her attention to negotiating the rolling prairie by light of a partial moon.

Two Hatchets had clearly been sent by the Dogs to lure her in. Most likely for capture, interrogation and eventual disposal. That meant the Dog Society had well and truly targeted Annja Creed for death.

They certainly showed signs of arrogance to a near-suicidal degree. But she found it hard to imagine they’d actually told their snitch to lure her into the middle of their big top-secret confab. She guessed her actual reception committee had either been waiting for her in another part of the training center, or perhaps were still waiting futilely somewhere else entirely.

As for why Two Hatchets had done what he had, she guessed he’d either misheard his instructions and screwed up, or had decided to get clever, improvise, presumably impress his masters with his zeal and resourcefulness.

And screwed up. Fatally. From her brief acquaintance with the man that seemed about right.

Annja thought about calling Tom Ten Bears and tipping him off that the Dog Society was cooking up a big steaming cauldron of evil. There was no guarantee he’d believe her. Even if the highway patrol turned out and found signs of a battle royal, it wouldn’t necessarily substantiate any wild-eyed claims of a conspiracy to mount a nationwide insurrection. They’d probably think more in terms of some kind of major drug deal gone way off the rails. If the Dogs picked up their casualties before clearing out—and she knew they would—there wouldn’t necessarily be any evidence tying them to the massacre at all.

Am I just rationalizing the fact that I really do not want to get hauled in for questioning on this, much less implicated in the bloodshed? she wondered. But no, she told herself, her reasoning was sound, as far as it went.

Besides, what she had witnessed was the sort of massive bloodletting that didn’t happen in well-mannered First World countries. Especially the U.S. And when it did, she knew, the authorities clamped an iron lid on tight. So that nothing really happened, after all—as far as the public ever knew.

There was an even more compelling reason not to call the cops, she knew. But her mind shied away from dealing with it. Get warm first, she decided.

Feeling half past dead from cold and exhaustion, she finally dragged her way back to her car. She made herself scope the scene from the night. She saw nothing threatening. When she came up to the car she found no sign the doors had been jimmied, nor were people waiting in the foot wells of the backseat to ambush her.

Annja got in and drove. She knew there was a danger that the GPS record from her phone would clearly show her route to the training center, not to mention her escape. So would the pings from the phone to the relay towers, if anybody bothered to check either. She knew every cell phone sold contained built-in spy and tracking devices for law enforcement. So she paused, regretfully, to delete the memory of her expensive third-generation phone, throw its shell in the Dumpster of one closed-for-the-night business in a not-well-trafficked part of Lawton, and the SIM card, stamped into pieces, in another. She didn’t dare use it again, nor allow it to record any more of her progress.

Her real reason for not calling the police, and the biggest reason for not wanting to be tracked, was the sizzling and nasty suspicion that law enforcement in the region was itself infiltrated by the Dog Society. Part of it was hunch. Part of it was knowing more about how law enforcement actually worked than most members of the ever-trusting public.

She was as sure that Lieutenant Tom Ten Bears was clean as she was that the sun would rise in the east in too few more hours. But it didn’t mean everybody else in Troop G was. And thanks to the war on terror, there was way too much interconnectivity between forces, departments and agencies for anything resembling real security. It could be someone connected with the Lawton cops, or the Comanche County Sheriff’s Department, or even the Feds who used the information she provided to set the death squads on her trail.

It wouldn’t even take an actual traitor or a mole to betray her to torture and death, she realized. Tom and Johnny Ten Bears had both told her there were no secrets in Indian country. Especially when information was so widely disseminated, there was no telling who might brag, or blurt, or wonder aloud—or even make some kind of seemingly harmless comment on what he or she had done at work that day to the family. All it took was for someone to overhear and innocently tell the wrong other someone. And Annja would be dead.

Forty-five minutes after leaving the mall parking lot she walked through the door of the Bad Medicine.

“I need a place to hide out,” she told the curious Iron Horse People gathered there. “The Dogs are on my trail.”

“Lookit,” Billy White Bird said around a mouthful of cereal. “Johnny’s a TV star.”

“With those looks he’s a natural,” Angel said. “Too bad we’re all likely to show up on screen right next to him. Especially you, with that jack-o’-lantern face of yours.”

Under the circumstances Annja found it hard to feel more than an academic appreciation for the Iron Horses’ gallows humor. They sat in the living room of a club safe house, a sprawling ranch-style set off by itself down a country lane, well screened by trees and surrounding terrain. Evening light filtered in over the tops of heavy curtains.

Shown to a room of her own by her hosts on arrival Annja had slept most of the day. She had awakened to find it had hit the proverbial fan.

The TV switched from an image of a mug shot of the absent Johnny Ten Bears to a newswoman in a rain-slicker standing by a rain-swept gulley as technicians in coroner’s jackets hauled out a body bag from behind her.

“The latest victims in today’s shocking wave of violence in the Lawton area, which has claimed at least six lives, with several more missing and feared dead, are two of our own—reporter Monica Stevenson and her cameraman, Rondé St. John. They were discovered in this gulley west of Lawton and south of Fort Sill just forty-five minutes ago. Both had their hands bound behind their backs by wire and both had been shot once in the back of the head. Their bodies also showed what a Comanche County Coroner’s Department spokesperson described as, ‘signs of torture.’”

“Bad sign,” said Angel, who sat next to Annja on the couch with her legs drawn up beneath her. Annja hadn’t realized before how petite the Comanche biker woman was. She probably wasn’t even five feet tall; her leather jacket seemed to dwarf the rest of her.

“Notes discovered on Ms. Stevenson’s computer reveal she headed out early this morning to meet with a confidential informant who has been aiding her in an ongoing investigation into a shadowy western Oklahoma Native American group calling itself the Iron Horse People Motorcycle Club. Authorities are blaming the club for the current violent crime wave. Special Agent in Charge Lamont Young of the Lawton office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has just announced that the Department of Homeland Security has named the motorcycle club a terrorist group. We switch now to a live press conference—”

“Can we change the channel?” Billy White Bird asked. He sat in a reclining chair eating his cereal from an outsize mug. “I hate that dude.”

Ricky, who sprawled on the floor with his back propped against the couch next to Angel, clicked the remote. On CNN some newsface was interviewing George Abell by video feed. The Horses hissed like angry cats.

“Whoops,” Ricky said. “Let’s move on before somebody heaves a boot through the screen.” He turned to a cartoon channel.

“Young was involved in the Waco massacre, you know,” Ricky said to Annja.

Annja raised a brow. “He seems young for that.”

“It’s that smooth baby face of his,” Billy White Bird said. “Easy to maintain when you don’t have a conscience.”

“I think he’s aching for an opportunity to try again with the same tactics and get a better outcome,” Ricky said.

“Why did you say the report about the bodies of those TV people was a bad sign?” Annja asked Angel. “Other than for them?”

“Bad news for us,” Angel said. “It means the Bureau’s going for a shock-and-awe publicity blitz. They usually don’t release details like that, especially while they’re hauling the bodies to the meat wagon. It was a setup to naming us terrorists and Johnny as the FBI’s Most Wanted.”

“You sound very authoritative,” Annja said.

Angel shrugged. She looked acutely unhappy.

“She used to work for the U.S. Attorneys’ Office,” Ricky said.

“She was an up-and-coming young prosecutor,” Billy added with relish. “She’s older than she looks, too.”

“What happened?” Annja asked.

“I grew a conscience,” Angel said quietly. “Or it woke up. Whatever.”

Ricky patted her thigh comfortingly. “Fortunately it didn’t start to age her, like a vampire in the sunlight or whatever.”

Billy burped and set the empty bowl on a TV tray beside him. The three Iron Horses had been in the house when Annja emerged sleepily an hour before. They’d pointed her to a well-stocked kitchen, where she’d braced herself with a big slice of panfried ham, eggs and beans.

She was forcing herself to take it easy. She’d driven herself hard for a long time—since weeks before flying back to land hip-deep in the horror that happened to Paul and his associates. She’d traveled long distances and delved deep into sorrow. She’d fought for her life and taken life and fled for her life. All of these things took tolls. On the body and on the soul.

And who knows how long I’ll get to rest? she thought. So she curbed her restless nature, her impatient desire for action.

There’ll be action enough soon, she reminded herself. More than enough for a normal person’s entire lifetime.

“So, Billy,” she said, recognizing a need to be distracted, “feel free to tell me this is too personal—but what on earth is that tattoo on your stomach, anyway?”

Angel barked a foxlike laugh, then covered her mouth shyly. “Sorry,” she said. “But would he go around without a shirt on all the time if he
didn’t
want people asking about that tat?”

“Hey,” Billy said, sounding aggrieved but grinning as he pulled up his stained white T-shirt. “I’m wearing something today.”

“Just be glad he didn’t compensate by leaving his pants off,” Ricky said.

Annja leaned forward to peer at the artwork etched on the broad canvas of Billy’s belly. She saw it was a beautiful, remarkably intricate work in blue ink, after the fashion of a nineteenth-century newspaper lithograph. It displayed what she took for a Comanche warrior riding his pony away from a small party of U.S. Army cavalry who, from their bearing, she guessed were a general and his staff. The warrior was showing them his bare backside and slapping it for emphasis.

“That’s, um, remarkable,” she said. “How long have you had it?”

“Since I was a kid. All these years I still kept my svelte shape, you see.” He slapped his belly, which jiggled.

Annja cocked a brow. “And you served in the military?”

“Oh, yeah. Where I learned my trade.”

“What did they say when they saw that tattoo at boot camp?”

“‘
Semper fi,
Marine.’” He braced in his chair and snapped off a perfect salute.

She stared at him a moment, then laughed out loud.

“I served in Iraq, round one,” Billy said, leaning forward to settle his beefy elbows on the table.

“He’s older than he looks,” a voice said from the side. Annja turned to see Johnny Ten Bears, wet hair hanging over the shoulders of his colors, grinning at her from the door to the kitchen. “Not to mention worse.”

“Much worse,” Billy agreed.

“Have you been here all this time?” Annja demanded.

“Heck, no,” Johnny said. “Just came in the back.”

“I didn’t hear you.”

“Good. Injun warriors specialize in sneaking up on unsuspecting white-eyes. I’d have to hand back my Boy Scout merit badge in redskin perfidy if I couldn’t pull it off.”

“I knew Johnny’s daddy, even,” Billy said, clearly feeling expansive. “We served in the same Marine Expeditionary Unit. Then again, us Numunu boys always tended to stick together. Kiowai too. All us Injuns did.”

He made a face that made him resemble a jack-o’-lantern more than usual. “’Course, old Tom and I come to some pretty opposite conclusions about what a good idea that whole war was.”

“He has a habit of coming down on the wrong side of every fence,” Johnny said, not smiling anymore. “When he gets off it, that is.”

That killed the conversation for a moment. Sorry, Billy mouthed to Annja.

“Where’ve you been?” she asked Johnny.

Johnny came and sat unselfconsciously on the floor near Annja. “Walking up and down in the world, and going back and forth in it,” he said.

“Old joke,” she said.

“For you, maybe, Ms. Renaissance Scholar.”

“He was probably hiding your rental car somewhere and getting rid of that Magnum you brought back,” Ricky said.

“That’s right,” Johnny said.

“You came in last night?”

“You were snoring like a chainsaw,” Billy said. “It was downright cute.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“So was that horse pistol hot?” Billy asked Annja.

“Radioactive,” she said. “Probably.”

She hadn’t wanted to dump it anywhere herself after her escape from the training center slaughter; the chance of discovery was too great. Whereas the Iron Horses had, as she assumed,
ways
. As indeed it seemed they had.

“You want to know what I did with it?” Johnny asked.

“No. But how about my car?”

“Stashed in a garage in town, in case somebody tracks it. When you need it we can get it back.”

“So what are your plans from here, Ms. Creed?” Johnny asked.

“Good question,” she said. “I’m still determined to track the skinwalker killer and stop him. I haven’t forgotten that even if everybody else has. Also—”

She hesitated. Will I sound too presumptuous? Then she thought, Screw it. My whole life’s presumptuous.

“I want to clear your names,” she said. “You were right about the Dog Society—all of it.”

She had told them what she had seen the night before. “And I was wrong. I don’t want to see you suffer for their crimes—past, present or future.

“Don’t forget I enjoy pride of place on the Dog Society’s hit list,” she said. “I’m the witness who can nail their coffin shut. And they were after me even before I got caught like a complete fool spying on their little terror con fab.”

“So why didn’t you go to the authorities, Annja?” Johnny asked.

“As in Special Agent in Charge Young?” she said. “Or as in your father?”

“Either one.” His gaze and voice were flat.

“You think this is the first time I’ve lived by the maxim ‘if you don’t dare call the cops, call the outlaws’?” she asked. “Anyway, isn’t that a funny question for an outlaw biker to ask? Especially one who just hit number one on the FBI’s Most Wanted list?”

“Not so much, Annja,” Angel said earnestly. “I think what we’re all wondering is why
you
made that choice,” Angel said. “It’s not the same as advocating it ourselves, right?”

Annja reminded herself that what looked like a sweet high-school girl playing at running with the pack was a woman who was probably older than she was, and an attorney to boot. “All right,” she said, “fair enough. I don’t trust law enforcement.”

Johnny frowned. “Consider the blatantly obvious question asked.”

“I trust your father,” she told him. “That doesn’t mean I trust everybody around him. There’re too many ears in that Department of Public Safety office. Not just his fellow officers. Dispatchers. Clerks. People from other divisions walking by the door. The UPS dude. They don’t even have to be moles themselves. All they have to do is tell the wrong friend or family member something exciting they heard. Or even say it in front of the wrong random person.”

Billy turned his somewhat scary grin on his chief. “She’s a smart one, Johnny. Admit it.”

“When did I deny it?” He sounded more grumpy than growly.

“Plus,” Annja said, her conscious mind suddenly dredging one of the subconscious warnings that had stopped her last night to the surface, “the Feds are almost certainly monitoring his cell phone.”

“You do realize that would be illegal, Annja?” Angel said.

“That doesn’t mean they’re not doing it—right?”

“Right.” Angel shrugged. “Another reason I quit.”

“So what do you plan?” Johnny asked, standing and stretching.

Annja shook her head. “I don’t know yet. Hang with you guys if you’ll let me. Use this as a base. And—”

She drew in a deep breath and sighed it out. “Wait for some kind of opportunity.”

Johnny looked to his comrades.

“I like her, Johnny,” Angel said.

“Fine with me,” Ricky said.

“I think she’s a keeper,” Billy said.

“What about the rest of the club?” Annja couldn’t help asking.

“They’re not here,” Johnny said. “Okay. Make yourself at home.”

“Do you have a better plan? Anybody? I’m asking that seriously,” Annja asked.

Johnny shook his head. Then he flashed his dazzling grin. “But opportunity’ll break somewhere,” he said. “It always does.”

Annja might have made some flip, ironic comeback. But she wasn’t that person.

She believed opportunity always broke, too. Somewhere.

I just hope it breaks in time, she told herself, before there’s a lot more heartache.

She had to admit she didn’t like the odds.