Off the Grid (19 page)

42

M
ukwa was turning into a persistent visitor—tonight he came to the Chief to show him a dark, silent, wintry forest. He then led him farther into the forest to a small clearing, where a thin spear of moonlight filtered down through the sparse, leafless canopy to illuminate the forest floor, which was covered by a crepe-thin sheet of crackling ice. Above, skeletal, crystallized branches winked and sparkled, fancily adorned by an ice storm.

Somewhere nearby, “waboo”
—
rabbit—stuck his twitching nose out from beneath a barberry bush to test the night air, then hopped out cautiously from under cover to forage for food. That was strange, because waboo wouldn’t normally leave his hutch at night because of the many dangers, so this little bunny was hungry.

As his soft, furry paws mounted the ice on the forest floor, it snapped and crackled under his insignificant weight, and waboo froze in place, knowing the sound would alert predators. His hunger had driven him to judge poorly.

In the near distance, shadows began to materialize and draw closer.

“Wiisagizi maa’ingan.”
Mukwa spoke for the first time since Khe Sahn.

Coyotes. The tricksters.

The Chief woke up to the tinging of ice pellets still chattering against the window, and let out a heavy sigh, wishing Mukwa had shown him what had happened to waboo.

Gino had no idea how long he’d been sleeping—one minute he’d been talking to Magozzi, trying to distract him from the missing Monkeewrench gang, even though McLaren had reported back with positive news. And then the next minute he felt a burning crick in his neck and a hand on his arm, shaking him gently awake. He opened his eyes and saw a blurred figure with black hair standing in front of him who he hoped was Magozzi and not a bear. “Uh . . . how long have I been out?”

“A couple hours, maybe.”

“Sorry I zonked on you.” Gino swiveled his head to loosen his hamstrung neck.

“I zonked, too, woke up when Grace called.”

That woke Gino up instantly, which did nothing for his eyesight, because Magozzi still looked like a bear. “Are they okay? Where are they?”

“They’re okay, and they’re on their way here. I gave them directions.”

“They’re coming
here
? What’s going on?”

“She wanted to keep it short so they could get back on the road. They were calling from some old wayside pay phone. All she had time to tell me was that Monkeewrench got a call from someone pretending to be D.C. FBI, asking about John. Smith called them a few minutes later. He had a tap on their line, said the call wasn’t from D.C., it was from Minneapolis, and they had to get the hell out fast.”

Gino frowned. “So somebody really is after them?”

“That’s what Smith thinks. He’s with them and he’s got information he says we need immediately, so I told them to come here.”

Gino rubbed his eyes, thinking that if he could clear his vision, his thoughts would follow along. “What in the hell?”

Magozzi shook off the question like an unwanted touch. “We’ll find out soon enough. The only good news is she’s positive they weren’t followed. They’ve been driving most of the night and barely saw a car once they got out of the city.”

Gino struggled his way up into sitting position and worked on retrieving his wakeful bearings.

“What’s happening, Detectives?” A deep, sleepy voice came from the hallway as the Chief walked out wearing camouflage from head to toe.

“It’s a long story,” Magozzi said. “But we do have some visitors meeting up with us here. As soon as they arrive, we’ll be on our way. Maybe you could point us in a direction? Something off the reservation?”

The Chief crouched in front of the hearth and started tossing more logs and paper kindling into the fireplace. “Why off the rez? Your visitors got something against us skins?”

“Skins?” Gino asked.

“Tell me what’s really going on.”

The Chief deserved the truth, so Magozzi gave it to him. “Our friends are in trouble. And the last thing we want to do is bring trouble here to you.”

The Chief looked at them curiously. “What kind of trouble?”

Great question, Magozzi thought. “I’ll give you the short version. They’re with an ex-Fed who has a jihad out on him and they think there’s somebody after them. And if there’s any chance of danger, which we have to assume there is, no way we’re going to jeopardize you or your people.”

Chief sat down on the hearth. “We know how to handle trouble up here. No place safer. Now why don’t you tell me this long story so I can get an idea of what we’re dealing with here.”

Magozzi and Gino sighed collectively, then took turns telling Smith’s story, and in the telling, they both realized the story wasn’t so long after all. The sum total of their knowledge was that Smith and maybe anybody who ever knew him had bull’s-eyes on their foreheads. They’d left out the detail about Grace killing Smith’s would-be murderers, of course, and the Chief knew they were holding back something, but he didn’t push it. Good cops knew how and when to prise out information, and as they spoke with him, it became evident that the Chief fell into the good-cop category, because he asked all the right questions.

“Okay, let’s see if I got this straight. Two Middle Eastern guys try to kill a retired Fed who’s sailing with your friend Grace, and I can pretty much surmise what happened to them because you left out the ending of that particular tale.”

Gino and Magozzi kept their expressions impassive, which had probably been more telling than a shared glance would have been. But the Chief ignored it and continued.

“Then the marina owner got killed, you’re thinking for information on Smith’s whereabouts, and that maybe your friends are next because of their association with him.”

“Right,” Gino said.

“Which means you think your friends aren’t the only company we’re about to get.”

Magozzi shrugged uncomfortably. “Grace swears they weren’t followed. But I don’t know. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

The Chief studied their faces with eyes that looked like shiny black stones in the low light of the room before returning his attention back to the hearth. “You’re tying this all up with the terrorist angle, right?”

Gino and Magozzi just looked at him.

“Jihad, Middle Eastern assassins on a boat in the Caribbean, big-time terrorist plot . . . hey, guys. I’m an Indian, not an idiot. This Smith character is tangled in this web in a big way. How am I doing so far?”

“That’s about the long and short of it.”

Chief grabbed an iron poker and started coaxing the fire. His dark skin looked like old, burnished wood in the glow of the coals. “So why didn’t he stay invisible? Being with your Monkeewrench friends right now is putting them in even more jeopardy, am I right?”

Magozzi frowned down into his lap, one of the many places he habitually looked for answers, even though he never found them there. “Apparently he thinks they’re in danger with or without him.”

The Chief nodded absently. “Sounds like this is going to be one big ball of yarn to unravel.”

“I hope not,” Magozzi said, feeling exhaustion and worry start to nip at his nerves, along with the incessant clatter of ice on the windows.

The Chief remained silent and immobile for a long time before finally wagging his head, an ironic smile punctuating his mouth with deeply engraved parentheses. “John Smith. You can’t make this shit up.”

“What do you mean?” Gino asked.

“John Smith, on his way to an Indian reservation. That name has a real tight association with Native people. Does Pocahontas ring a bell?”

Magozzi and Gino looked at each other, suddenly recalling high school history classes. John Smith, Jamestown settler back in the early 1600s, saved from slaughter by an Indian princess, or so the story went. Maybe history would repeat itself.

The Chief seemed satisfied that they’d comprehended the irony of Smith’s name and his current situation. “I’m going to throw on a pot of coffee—too damn early for man or beast to be up and about. Sun’s not even close to a rise yet.”

Gino looked at the Chief’s camo again. “Are you and Claude hunting this morning or something?”

“That depends.” He stood on his sequoia legs and gestured for them to follow. “Come on, follow me out to the kitchen. I want to show you something.”

The Chief led them through the kitchen to the utility room, which had all the usual trappings—hot water heater, washer and dryer, extra cleaning and paper products, flashlights and candles. “If you need spare toilet paper, this is the place to come,” he chuckled, moving to the back of the room and unlocking a heavy door. “And if you need spare firepower, this is the place to come.”

Gino and Magozzi looked wide-eyed at the impressive array of impeccably tended hunting rifles and shotguns—one model or another appropriate for any animal that inhabited these forests, Magozzi figured. Boxes of corresponding ammunition were stacked neatly on shelves next to the gun racks.

“Wow,” Gino said. “This
is
a four-star hunting resort.”

The Chief nodded proudly. “We’re well equipped. The serious hunters bring their own hardware, but a big part of our business comes from corporate parties and weekend warriors who want to play survivalist for a couple days before they go back to their suits and ties and Starbucks lattes. Most of those types have never even held a gun before, so we give them gun safety first, target practice next, and if they pass, we let them check out a weapon and some ammo for their stay. I’m leaving these doors unlocked for you both.”

Gino scratched at the bumper crop of whiskers that had repopulated his jaw overnight. “That’s really nice of you, Chief, but I don’t think we’re going to have much time for target practice.”

“I’m not talking target practice, Detective.”

Gino and Magozzi wandered back into the living room and watched the ice pellets turn to a light snow while the Chief made coffee.

“The Chief’s nervous,” Gino finally said.

Magozzi checked his watch, wondering how far out Monkeewrench had been when they’d called from the wayside. “We just told him we have a carload of people who are on a terrorist hit list showing up at his front door. Of course he’s nervous. Aren’t you?”

“Well, yeah,” Gino conceded, then lifted his head abruptly and started sniffing the air like a hound. “You smell that, Leo?”

Magozzi inhaled the acrid fumes of marijuana filtering from the breezeway between the kitchen and living room. “Great. Just what we need—a stoned host with a closet full of guns.”

“That’s not pot, Detectives.” Claude’s voice startled them as he emerged sleepy-eyed from the hallway, wearing camo similar to the Chief’s. “That son of a bitch is smudging again. It’s only sage, but that shit smells worse than the worst ditch weed I ever smoked, and it lingers for a month, I swear.”

Chief walked into the living room cupping a smoldering river clam shell. “Everybody take a handful of smoke and wave it on yourselves.”

Claude rolled his eyes but did what he was told.

Gino coughed. “Why? And what’s smudging?”

“It’s a purification ritual and it keeps bad spirits at bay.”

“Well, I’m all for that,” Gino said, following Claude’s lead. “So this is sage?” Gino finally asked, his eyes watering as the smoke wreathed around his body.

“Yep. It’s medicine. A purifying herb.”

“Are you sure it’s not pot?”

The Chief gave Gino a condescending smile. “No more than the smoldering incense your priests smudge with on their way up the aisle. Most religions have more in common than you think. We’re different, and we’re the same. There’s a comforting synchronicity in that, don’t you think? Like we all came from the same place; we’re just different tribes. You two should go to bed, grab an hour or two of sleep while you have the chance.”

43

T
en miles north of the wayside, a gentle rain began pattering against the Range Rover’s windshield. Twenty miles farther north, the rain abruptly turned to sleet, and then ice pellets. John was driving now. He slowed considerably when the traction control kept kicking on and off as the tires began to skid on the ice-slick road. He kissed the shoulder twice, eased the wheel to the left, and almost spun into a three-sixty.

“Do you want to stop and wait this out?” Grace asked him.

“No. We can’t. But it’s white-knuckle driving. We’re going to have to take short shifts. Harley, you’re up.”

John moved to the rear and Harley replaced him without complaint or comment. He was a seasoned veteran of winter driving, but even he couldn’t manage the Rover much better than John in such miserable conditions, which were getting worse by the minute. Skill, four-wheel drive, and fancy electronic traction and braking systems were useless when you were navigating a skating rink.

Forty minutes into his shift, Harley had slowed to a crawl, but even then, the truck danced all over the road and ice was accumulating on the windshield faster than the defroster could melt it. He finally flicked on the emergency lights and pulled over, grabbed the ice scraper, and went outside to clear it.

Grace shifted up to the driver’s seat and watched Harley work in the ambient glow of the headlights, frozen chips flying up from under his scraper blade to land in his dark beard and hair. When he finally came back in through the rear door, he was shivering and frosted with ice.

“Move over, John,” he grunted, shaking the tiny icicles off his beard. “You get the hump this shift.”

When everybody was settled, Grace eased the Rover back onto the road and kept the right wheels on the gravel shoulder.

“Are you sure you’re okay to drive, honey?” Annie asked from the passenger seat. “You didn’t sleep a lick.”

Grace sighed. “Couldn’t.” She’d jumped a lot of psychological hurdles recently, but apparently three months on a sailboat in the Caribbean couldn’t completely eradicate a lifetime of paralyzing paranoia. She still didn’t trust anyone to drive, to keep watch, to see all the warning signs she’d trained herself to notice and react to over the years. She’d had a respite from that on the boat, but it had all come flooding back with John’s voice on the phone saying,
Get out. Right now.

Within the hour, all three men were snoring noisily in the backseat.

“Harley!” Annie hissed, actually reaching back to poke him in the stomach. “Close your mouth, for God’s sake. You sound like a dying hog.”

Harley shifted his weight and grunted, but never came fully awake.

“Men,” she grumbled. “They fall asleep the minute they sit down and the hell with whatever goes on around them. No wonder they can sleep in foxholes. Women watch and worry, men snore.”

Grace smiled. “Maybe they’re the lucky ones.”

“They’re the stupid ones. They sleep through the baby crying and the burglar breaking glass in the front door. If the woman didn’t shake them awake, they’d snore through Armageddon.”

“You sound a little bitter.”

“I’m sleep-deprived from staying awake to make sure Harley and John didn’t drive us into a tree . . . wait a minute. Is that the lodge?”

Grace glanced right. “Must be.”

“Well, bless me, that’s a good-looking building with nice landscaping and decent architecture and you can see all those lights in all those big, beautiful windows. They’ve got electricity, Grace, and probably indoor plumbing. So I say screw a cabin where we’ve probably got to cook dead animals in a pot over a fireplace and go to the bathroom on a tree trunk, which is, I need to tell you, a skill I have never perfected . . . hey. You drove right past the entrance.”

“Magozzi said go to the cabin, so that’s where we’re going.”

Annie saw the Rover’s headlights illuminate a carved wooden sign that advertised Cabin One with an upward-pointing arrow. After ten long minutes on a rough, two-track dirt road that was apparently maintained by gophers, they emerged from the thick woods into a small clearing. Grace brought the Rover to a stop in front of a large log home with a brightly lit wraparound porch that looked like it belonged in a very wealthy suburb for lumberjacks.

“Well,” Annie said happily. “This doesn’t look quite as awful as I expected in spite of my innate prejudice against log structures, which just says you were too lazy to saw the tree trunks into nice smooth boards. On the upside, there are no carcasses hanging from tree branches, no yahoos on the porch with long rifles over their shoulders. People with money stay here. I like that.”

Grace cracked her window, the film of ice that was coating it shattering to the ground, then turned off the ignition.

“Good Lord, would you listen to that? I haven’t heard owls hootin’ like that since Mississippi.”

“Pretty,” Grace admitted, relieved to see daybreak finally penetrating the woods. “But a little spooky.”

“Mournful songs,” Annie murmured, listening to the soft hoots breaking the still night air, then hugging her shoulders. “Cold,” she shivered, rubbing her bare arms. “Close the window and let’s get inside.”

The men in the backseat snorted their way into wakefulness. “Where the hell are we?” Harley groaned. “And why aren’t we moving?”

“We’re there,” Grace said, watching the front door open and four men step out onto the porch. “And there are your yahoos, Annie.” She saw Magozzi first. He was carrying his shoulders the way he did when he was on adrenaline watch.

Gino stood next to him, legs spread as if he needed a wide base to stay upright. Flanking them were two much older men.

Chief watched the ice-coated Range Rover sliding sideways to a reluctant stop a short distance from the steps. He was thinking that they were all part of a nostalgic configuration: a line of men standing motionless, expressionless, waiting as others approached. Chief remembered a page that repeated time and again in his own history.

The tribal elders always stood quietly in the chamber, their faces unreadable as members appeared before them to receive their wisdom. They seemed invincible, above emotional involvement. He’d been eleven the first time he’d been admitted to the chamber, scared to death by the aged faces of men and women who had lived so many years.

For the first time in all his life, he now felt like an elder, and realized that on this day, that was what he was. He hadn’t sought the role as leader; fate had chosen him, and the mantle of responsibility lay heavily on his shoulders. In Vietnam, all the Chimooks had called him Chief just because he was an Indian, something he’d never minded one bit or considered racist, because back home, he was only a brave. But he had eventually earned the title, more so after his appointment to the Tribal Police.

Like the other men standing beside him, he watched the front passenger door of the Range Rover open, spilling cracked ice on the ground. But unlike the others, his gaze was impassive and uncluttered by human emotion.

The woman who emerged first was relatively short, but quite amazingly plump. To his eye, this voluptuous visage was a sign of wealth. Slender young women might stir a young man’s lust, but the amply endowed promised pillows of comfort for grown men ready for the long, peaceful rest that warmed their older years. Better yet, the woman wore her weight like a badge of honor, so confident in her own skin that she moved with a come-hither sensuality that invited all to adore her.

He watched her sashay a few steps from the truck and cock a hip. She wore a strange dress made of feathers, which he saw as a sign, and moved with utmost confidence on high-heeled boots she balanced perfectly on the slick, icy surface of the drive. She was as self-assured as Noya, fully aware of her power.

“Which one of you gentlemen is going to come down here and escort a lady?” she called out with a southern lilt that sent Claude tripping over his own feet to race down icy steps, arm chivalrously offered.

The next creature out of the truck was a bizarre-looking dog so genetically jumbled he could have been a feral rez dog. Chief saw that as a sign as well. The dog raced from tree to tree in exuberance, city paws slipping on the ice. That was the wondrous thing about the wolf’s cousin. Dogs were first and always dogs, never pretending to be anything else. He stopped suddenly at one tree, leg raised comically, and turned his head to focus on Gino and Magozzi.

He made a beeline for the two men, slipping and sliding up the steps and finally leaping to place front paws on Gino’s shoulders, his whole body wagging a nonexistent tail.

The remaining occupants stepped out of the Rover. First was a stunningly beautiful woman who had to be Grace MacBride, and it was obvious she wielded absolute power over Magozzi. The change in the man’s posture and respiration was like a neon sign to anybody who cared to look. Following her were two men so different in stature, color, and carriage, they could have been from two different planets. The big, bearded man was a sturdy soul, while the tall, thin man was a lost one, so ambiguous in every way, Chief wondered if he was a Two Spirit.

Grace’s eyes were on Magozzi as she stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up. Eventually her gaze moved to the two old men they were putting in danger just by being here. “We won’t stay here, Magozzi.”

John nodded briefly to Gino and Magozzi and ignored the tall man who was totally preoccupied with Annie. Then John’s eyes rested on the Chief, who wore this place and this land on his face. “John Smith,” he said to introduce himself. “I trust Magozzi and Gino told you that having us here is not safe for you. We’ll only stay long enough to tell the detectives what they need to know.”

“Chief Bellanger, Tribal Police. This is our safest place, and now it’s yours. Welcome.”

John shook his head, then glanced at Magozzi. “Is there someplace we can talk?”

“Inside,” Chief said. “Everybody. We know what’s happening, we know the risks, and we can’t let you take these women away from a place where they can be protected.”

John frowned at Magozzi. “You told them?”

“We told them everything we know.”

“Was that wise?”

“There was a good reason. They might as well hear whatever you have to say.”

“Boozhoo,” Harley said, moving his bulk onto the porch like a boulder displacing stones.

The Chief cocked his head. “You speak Ojibwe?”

“Just enough to get myself a free meal. I had friends up at Bad River a while back.”

“Then you have friends here. Everyone inside, please.”

Roadrunner tried to fit his size fourteens on the steps and angled all his appendages to mount them. He looked like a praying mantis climbing a hill and dropped his head in front of the Chief, totally screwed by confusing protocol as usual, timid as always. “I’m Roadrunner.”

Chief nodded and took his hand, frowning down at the crippled fingers. “Looks like you tangled with some kind of machinery. Farm accident?”

Roadrunner blinked. “Foster father with a hammer.”

Chief tightened lips that were barely there to begin with, then looked Roadrunner in the eye. “Did you kill him?”

“No. I ran away.”

“How old were you?”

“Eight.”

Chief nodded. “Very smart. Of course you’re older now. You could pay him a visit with a hammer of your own.”