Tribal Ways. Alex Archer

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СКАЧАТЬ just in the movies,” Annja said.

      “No! It looked like a wolf but didn’t move like one.”

      He shook his head from side to side so violently Annja was afraid he’d pull something loose. “No! No! It was terrible. Oh, God. It killed them. It was so fast. So strong. Not anything natural—”

      “Why would a wolf attack such a large group of people?” she asked. It made no sense to her that a solitary member of a pack-hunting species would attack multiple human beings. It totally reversed the whole mathematics of wolf predation.

      “It wasn’t natural, I tell you. Wasn’t an animal!” His eye rolled. “Annja, listen. It wasn’t an animal. It wasn’t. And it’s hunting me!”

      He sat up and grabbed her arm with his good hand. Alarms began to shrill.

      “It was a skinwalker! A Navajo wolf! I saw his eyes—those glowing—”

      The frantic cry ended.

      Paul seemed to shrink, then fell back onto the bed. His one visible eye stared at the ceiling.

      The keening of the flatline alarms was barely audible through the roaring in Annja’s ears.

      2

      “What’s your interest in this poor deceased fella, Ms. Creed?”

      Lieutenant Tom Ten Bears of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol sat down behind the plain wooden desk in his office. He had the unmistakable look of an officer who’d spent many years with the force. Not a tall man, he was built strong and low to the ground, short in the legs, wide around the middle, suggesting still both strength and a certain agility.

      Annja sat across from him in a not very comfortable wooden chair. It reminded her way too much of being called before the Mother Superior back at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. She suspected the visiting-the-principal effect wasn’t entirely accidental.

      “We’re friends, Lieutenant,” she said. “Uh, were friends.”

      The highway patrol officer’s round, pockmarked face, beneath a salt-and-pepper military cut, was set in lines and contours of grave compassion. He probably gets a lot of practice with that look in his line of work, she realized. It also didn’t mean he didn’t feel it.

      The office walls were wood paneling. An Oklahoma state flag hung behind him, along with a plaque in the arrowhead shape of the OHP patch, certificates of completion from training courses and numerous citations, including a commendation from the Comanche Nation. From his features and body type, which would have been burly and bearlike even if he hadn’t been carrying a certain excess above the belt, Annja suspected he was a member of the Nation himself. She gathered they hadn’t named this Comanche County for nothing.

      “My condolences,” he told her. “I know that don’t help much. All the times I’ve offered condolences over the years, I never yet figured out a way that actually does a body any good. I keep trying.”

      “I appreciate it, Lieutenant. Really.”

      “It was unusual for them to let you in to see him. But the ICU staff tell me he kept asking for you so insistently they figured it was better for him to let him see you.”

      “Maybe that was a mistake,” she said, faltering.

      He shook his head. “No point second-guessing something like that, Ms. Creed. That poor boy was pretty torn up. I don’t reckon he could’ve lasted long regardless of anything you did or didn’t do.”

      “Thanks,” Annja said.

      She drew in a deep breath and tried to ignore the stinging in her eyes. “I was coming out to visit him,” she said. “He was also kind enough to want to consult with me on the dig, even though pre-Columbian North American archaeology is way outside my area of study.”

      “You’re doin’ me a favor, Ms. Creed, by comin’ out here to see me,” he said. “I was needing to interview you, anyway.”

      He put on a pair of heavy-framed reading glasses and moved his mouse around on the pad, peering at a flat-screen monitor set at an angle so as not to intrude between him and a visitor. Aside from an in-box stacked with papers, the only other objects on his desk were a picture of a grinning young and handsome Indian man wearing an Army uniform, a much younger girl, maybe twelve, with pigtails, both built along much more aerodynamic lines than the lieutenant, and another picture of a young man in BDUs and combat gear with a bullet-pocked adobe wall for a backdrop. The soldier held a CAR-4 assault carbine decked out with the usual array of sights and lights. He looked like the same person as the grinning kid in the other photo, only older. Not so much in years, maybe, but still much older, Annja thought.

      “So you work for a television show,” he said.

      “Yes. I’m kind of the resident skeptic—the token voice of reason. I suspect Paul’s superiors hoped that by inviting me out they might put their department in the way of some free publicity.”

      “The anthro department at OU wanted to get on something called Chasing History’s Monsters?”

      She shrugged. “The hope of getting on TV can have a strange effect on people. Even intelligent, well-educated ones.”

      He made a face, took off the glasses and looked at her. “Maybe the monster thing’s actually appropriate now. Is that what brings you to see me, Ms. Creed?”

      “I want to learn everything I can about what happened to my friend,” she said. “Also his colleagues. And the poor man whose property the dig site was on.”

      “Old Eric,” Ten Bears said. “Pretty righteous guy. Did well for himself and his family from leasing natural-gas rights on some of his land out there south of the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge. Always quick to help out a fellow Nation member or crack a joke. Even if he did have lousy taste in ’em.”

      “He was a friend of yours?”

      Ten Bears nodded. “I know a lot of people in our region. Know a whole lot of Indian good old boys like me.”

      “I’m sorry.”

      “Thanks. Listen, it was a pretty ugly scene out there, Ms. Creed. I’ve worked a lot of homicides over the years. I’ve worked some pretty terrible accident scenes. Never saw anything like that anywhere. I can’t really tell you anything the department hasn’t already released to the media. Tell the truth, I’m sorta glad.”

      He sat back, looking at her. He seemed not unfriendly. Not unkind, in fact. From the laugh lines bracketing his eyes and mouth she guessed he was by nature a pretty decent guy. She also knew that a seasoned homicide investigator wouldn’t hesitate to feign those emotions when he didn’t feel remotely kind or friendly, if it would help advance the case.

      “What’d the decedent tell you?” he asked quietly.

      “He said he was attacked by what, frankly, sounded more like a movie monster than anything in the real world.”

      “You’ve had some experience investigating monsters, I guess,” he said. “What’s your take on that?”

      “Are СКАЧАТЬ