“I vote we don’t,” said Heath. “Gilley? Would you rather take this very dangerous job where you will probably die a really painful death, or go home to the safety of Boston for a few days of R and R?”
I redirected the steely-eyed look to Heath. “Do we
really
need the theatrics? He’s not likely to
die
, Heath!”
But he refused to look at me. Instead he kept his eyes on Gilley and reached for my bandaged arm. Lifting it before I could pull it away, he said, “No theatrics necessary. Just imagine if this had been
your
arm, Gil. Or your chest. Or your face!”
Gilley visibly paled and touched all three places on his body as if checking to make sure they were unmarred.
It was then that I decided to throw off the gloves. “Gilley,” I said sharply, pulling his attention from Heath. “If you want to go, you can go. I won’t stop you. But I’m going to stay here and work this case with or without you, and with or without Heath for that matter. You can head home, but you’ll be going back on the promise you made to my mom to always stand by me. If you can live with that, then fine. I’m sure Mama’s spirit will get over it . . . eventually.”
Gil folded his arms across his chest and frowned at me. “Really, M. J.? You’re going to throw your dead mother into this?”
I shrugged. “I’m just stating facts, Gil. You have to make a decision you can live with.”
“
If
you live,” Heath countered. It was clear he was banking on me backing down if Gil wouldn’t commit.
Gilley sighed and muttered something under his breath, which didn’t sound very flattering to either Heath or me, but in the end he sided with me. “Sheriff Pena,” he said. “We’re in. But we’ll need the check up front. There’s some equipment we need to buy.”
Pena nodded and motioned with his chin to Heath. “You in, Whitefeather?”
Heath looked as angry as I’d ever seen him, but I didn’t much care. He needed my help and for that matter he needed Gilley’s help too, so he’d just have to get over it. “I was always in,” he said levelly.
“Good,” said the sheriff. “Then we’ll need to set a few ground rules so these two don’t ruffle too many feathers.”
I couldn’t imagine ruffling any more feathers than we already had, but I didn’t say anything—I just let Pena talk. “The first rule of the Pueblo—”
“Is that there is no Pueblo!” Gilley said quickly, giggling at his inside joke. I kicked him again under the table and that wiped the grin off his face. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ll be good.”
Pena continued without missing a beat, “. . . is that you three are guests of the tribe. In other words, you’re one notch above tourists, but not much above them, understand?”
“We can’t go into any unauthorized places or public buildings like the library without permission,” I said.
Pena nodded. “No more of this leaving your car at the entrance to the Pueblo during sacred ceremonies and walking on tribal ground, okay?”
“Understood,” I told him.
“Also,” he continued, “the Pueblo is normally closed to outsiders after eight p.m., but I’m going to grant you three special access until two a.m. Again, you won’t be able to enter any homes or buildings unless you’ve been given special permission, but you may patrol the Pueblo and the highlands as you see fit. The only area completely off-limits to you is the burial grounds. No outsiders are allowed there under any circumstances.”
“Can we have a map of the Pueblo, Sheriff?” I asked, worried that we might wander onto some off-limits territory without realizing it.
Pena got up and swiveled the chair around to tuck it back under the table. “No,” he said without explanation, which surprised me. “You two just stick with Whitefeather here, and he’ll keep you out of trouble, right, Heath?”
“Yes, sir,” Heath promised, keeping his eyes on the table.
The sheriff nodded and wished us luck with a tip of his hat, and then he left us alone to hash out a plan.
Gil brought up the story of the black hawk legend again and how the medicine man had taken the spirit of the demon into his body, and it had turned him into an evil person who killed White Wolf. “They’re all buried in some secret location,” Gil said.
“And that must be where the black hawk escaped from,” I reasoned. “My thinking is that someone—”
“Daryl West,” Gil cut in, reminding me of the remains that were found on the Pueblo.
“Yeah, Daryl West,” I said. “He must’ve stumbled onto the secret burial place and somehow freed the demon, who then tore him to shreds.”
Heath made a T with his hands. “Time out,” he said. “Who’s this Daryl West dude?”
Gil explained how he’d managed to break into Deputy Cruz’s e-mails and found the identity of the remains of Daryl, who’d been declared by the coroner as having been the victim of a mountain lion attack.
“He comes from Los Alamos,” Gilley said, retrieving his tablet and scrolling through the e-mails. “And he had a few run-ins with the law over grave robbing, if you can believe it.”
Heath sat up straighter and leaned across the table to squint at Gilley’s screen. “Hold on,” he said. “Did you say grave robbing?”
Gil turned the tablet toward Heath so he could read it. “Yeah,” he said. “See?”
Heath took the gadget and studied the e-mail. “What is it?” I asked him.
“The reason Pena was reluctant to give you a map of our lands isn’t just because our burial grounds are sacred, but because there’s a pretty good black market that’s cropped up in recent years trading in ancient American Indian artifacts.”
My eyes widened. “You think West was robbing Native American burial grounds?”
“I’d bet on it,” he said.
“So then he really could’ve stumbled onto the vessel that held the black hawk,” I said, tapping my finger on the tabletop while I thought on that. “We need to find that vessel, guys.”
“Wouldn’t the demon have destroyed it?” Gil said. “I mean, if it escaped because West uncorked it, or did whatever to free the demon, it’s probably in a thousand pieces by now.”
I nodded. “You know, you’re right, Gil. Okay, so the place to start is where West’s remains were found. That’s got to be close to where the demon was hidden away all those years ago. Can you find us that locale, Gil?”
He nodded. “Yep,” he said, pulling out his wireless keyboard and clicking his fingers across it.
“And we’ll need to get some proper equipment,” I added while Gilley typed. “Now that we have some funds, we can get that night-vision camera and a couple more meters. When’s that used meter you already purchased going to get here?”
Gilley eyed his watch. “Today,” he said. “Should be dropped off at the front desk anytime before noon.”
We then hashed out a plan for the next hour, at the end of which Heath and I were once again on good terms.
Chapter 10
“That’s weird,” Heath said, staring at Gilley’s iPad later that day when we’d gone back to the hotel for a bit of rest before tackling the demon again.
“What’s weird?” I asked, peeking over his shoulder as he looked at the image of where Gil had pinpointed the exact location that the remains of Daryl West had been found.
“This isn’t as close to our burial grounds as I’d thought,” he said.
I squinted at the aerial snapshot. All I saw was scrub and rocky terrain. “Where is it, then?”
“No-man’s-land,” he said. “It’s on the other side of the foothills that surround the Zanto burial grounds.”
“Maybe Daryl went over the foothills to reach them?” I suggested.
Heath shook his head. “That’d be really stupid,” he said. “The foothills are steep and filled with loose rock and tricky terrain. Going over them would take four times as long as traveling by road, and you’d have to go in by foot, which would make for a really slow getaway. Unless of course you had a three-wheeler, which would only get you as far as the foothills and you’d still have to climb over them. Naw, if you were going to head to our burial grounds, you’d take the same road Bev took before she crashed.”
I studied the dot on the screen. “What the heck was he doing way out in no-man’s-land, then?”
“Probably running for his life,” Gil grumbled drowsily while he reclined back on his bed.
I ignored him and directed my next question at Heath. “How long will it take us to drive there?”
Heath poked at the screen to move the map around. “We can drive up the main road and get close, then hike in. It should only take us about an hour.”
“Well, we’d better go now, then,” I suggested. “I don’t want to get caught out there after dark.”
“We’re not even sure it’s safe during the day,” Heath said.
“Yeah, but at least the humidity will be at its lowest point now in the afternoon, which means that even if the demon did rear its ugly head, it’d be weaker than during the hours between midnight and dawn.”
Heath eyed me skeptically. “How many spikes you got?”
“Ten or so,” I said. “Five each should be enough.”
“Okay,” he relented. “And let’s see if Gil will let us borrow his sweatshirt.”
I eyed the bed where Gilley was lying back with his eyes closed. “Gil?”
No answer.
“Gilley?” I said a little louder.
He replied with a long nasal snore.
“He says we can take it,” I whispered.
Heath grinned at me and offered his hand. “Come on. Let’s get out there and see what we see.”
The trip to the site where Daryl’s remains were found took exactly one hour and we traveled the same road we’d come down when we went to check out the site where Beverly had crashed her car.
In fact, we parked very near the tree she’d hit, which was still scarred with the evidence of the crash and the talon marks of the demon. “Why doesn’t this feel like just a coincidence?” I said when we got out of the car.
Heath pulled out two of the spikes from the loops in his belt. “The demon must like this area,” he said, motioning for me to get my spikes out too.
I did and we set off on foot through the scrub and mostly bare earth. This wasn’t quite the desert, but it was certainly close.
I could see the foothills weren’t too far away, but the going was a little rough, that is, until Heath found some three-wheeler tracks.
“Who do you think made these?” I asked as he and I bent low to inspect them.
“I don’t know,” Heath said, and I could tell he was a little bothered by them.
“One of your younger cousins coming out here for a little joyride, maybe?” I asked.
Heath stood up and wiped his hands together to get the dust off. “Maybe. There were two ATVs along here,” he said. “One following the other.”
The tracks headed right for the foothills and as we walked along them, ever closer to the red dot on the screen of Heath’s iPhone, I gave up my theory that the ATV tracks belonged to someone from the tribe.
Especially when Heath pointed to yet a third set that had intersected the pair of tracks we were navigating almost exactly at the point where the satellite pinpointed the location where Daryl’s remains had been found.
There wasn’t much to this intersection except for a confusion of tire tracks and some wooden stakes planted in the ground with orange tags on them to mark the site for the coroner.
The energy around all this was bad, though. As in BAD.
“Something very violent happened here,” I said, holding my arms out to really feel the area around the wooden stakes.
Heath nodded. “You ain’t kidding,” he said. Then his eyes drifted to the tracks again, which carried on toward the foothills. “I want to see where they were coming from, Em.”
“Lead the way,” I told him, and we began walking again.
It didn’t take long; the foothills were only about two hundred yards away from where Daryl had died, and when we got to the base of the steep slope in front of us, it was clear that Daryl and his companion had either stopped here and hiked up or stopped here to rest for a while, because the ATVs had sunk into the loose dirt, which clearly indicated that they’d been parked there for a period of time.
“Do you think they went up there?” I asked, squinting toward the top of the hill.
Heath approached the slope. “I do,” he said, already starting up.
I didn’t question him, but tucked in right behind as we hoofed it up the slope.
About three-quarters of the way to the top, Heath suddenly stopped and pointed to the ground. In front of him was a long metal rod with a wooden handle. “What’s that?” I asked.
Heath moved over to it and picked it up, anger clouding his features. “They
were
after our burial grounds,” he said, showing me the rod like I might understand what he meant.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Heath, what is that thing?”
He came back down the slope a few feet to me and punched the rod into the earth. “It’s how these bastards locate a grave,” he explained. “They jam this into the ground and if they feel it give way, they start digging.”
I eyed the rod closely. It was covered in dirt midway up the shaft. “Looks like they found something.”
Heath looked up the slope again. “Sons of bitches,” he muttered.
I surveyed our location, a bit confused. “But these aren’t your burial grounds, right? Why would they bring that out here?”
Heath suddenly pointed to the ridge at the top of the slope. “There!” he said. “See that, Em?”
I squinted to where he was pointing, spotting a set of five caves along the ridge. I then eyed my watch. It was going on four p.m. “How long would it take to get up there?”
“Half hour.”
“When does the sun set again?”
“Around six thirty.”
I squeezed Heath’s hand. I knew he really wanted to see what was at the top of that ridge, but once we got up there, we’d have precious little time to check it out if we didn’t want to get caught out here after sunset. Then again, the demon was on the loose and there was another night ahead where it could terrorize one of Heath’s relatives. I made up my mind quickly, because we didn’t have another minute to spare. “Race you to the top,” I said, and let go of his hand to sprint up several yards of the slope.