Smoke Signals (A John Tall Wolf Novel Book 4) (4 page)

Two of the seats in the Gulfstream not only reclined, the arm rests between them folded up and tucked out of the way with the result being a double bed done in butter-soft leather. Nan, the flight attendant, brought out pillows and blankets, retreated to a nook near the cockpit and John and Rebecca took a snooze for the first two-thirds of the flight. No hanky-panky involved. That would have been uncouth. Still, Rebecca snuggled into John’s embrace and stayed there.

The pilots provided a flight smooth enough not to disturb their slumber.

After waking, righting their seats and refreshing themselves, Rebecca told John her story.

He listened carefully and agreed with her surmise that as things stood she might be forced out of the RCMP or transferred to a duty post so disagreeable she’d resign. Then he asked, “You want me to fix things for you?”

She gave him a look and asked, “You’ve got connections on the force higher than Serge Marchand’s?”

“Not directly. But you just had an election up in Canada, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but I didn’t think anyone down here noticed, even you.”

“Probably wouldn’t have, but the
Washington Post
ran the results in the sports section, next to the hockey scores.”

Rebecca smiled, but still gave him a punch on the shoulder.

A soft one, in case he had a trick as well as an arm up his sleeve.

“Okay, tell me what you’re thinking,” she said.

“I’ve been making friends in high places since I moved to Washington.”

“How high?”

“The president.”

Rebecca’s gaze took on a searching quality, as if looking for a joke. Her next sock at the guy sitting next to her might be a hard one. “Are you kidding me?”

John shook his head. He told her of working with Jim McGill, not getting too specific about the details, but saying, “I met the president after we wrapped things up. I know the VP, too, and my money says she’ll be the next president. I put in a good word for Marlene to become the Secretary of the Interior and she got the nomination.”

“Yeah, I read that, but I didn’t know you were behind it.”

John had to smile. He did know about a new prime minister being elected in Canada, probably would have taken notice in any case, but had paid special attention because of his engagement to Rebecca. After all, there was some chance he might move up there when he and Rebecca got married.

What impressed him, though, was that she had noticed Marlene’s nomination.

He couldn’t say whether the PM of Canada even had a cabinet.

“I’ve got a Google alert on Marlene,” Rebecca added.

John smiled. He’d told his sweetheart that Marlene had tried to seduce him more than once. Rebecca didn’t care that much about American politics. She was keeping an eye out for her guy.

“Probably wise,” John said. “I should do the same. Anyway, with my connections at the top of the U.S. government, and reading more than the sports section, I know relations between our countries are supposed to improve with the election of your new PM. I could ask President Grant or VP Morrissey for a little favor. Get things straightened out for you with the RCMP or maybe make you Canada’s new Secretary of the Interior.”

“Minister of the Interior,” Rebecca corrected him.

“I’ll make a note of that.”

“That’s sweet of you, thinking of me in such grand terms, but I just want to be a cop, a good one. Honest, trustworthy and all that.”

John leaned back for a bit of perspective. “So you’re going to let the chips fall where they may?”

She nodded. “That’s the only way I’ll see if I can get a fair shake.”

John kissed his fiancée, sat back and leaned his shoulder against hers.

He said quietly, “If you don’t get one, I’ll travel north and scalp this Marchand creep. Leave him with one nut and no hair.”

Rebecca laughed, kissed John’s cheek and said, “I promise not to tell on you if you do, but can you share with me what you’re up to right now? Or do I have to fly home spinning fantasies about your glamorous doings? I mean, jetting around in a plane like this and all.”

“Let’s get some drinks first, and then we can give Nan the rest of the flight off.”

Freddie Strait Arrow and Marlene Flower Moon wore hotel bathrobes. Marlene had her wet hair wrapped in a towel. Freddie reclined against an arm of a sofa, his feet on Marlene’s lap. She was rubbing them. To Freddie, that felt almost as good as what had transpired in the bedroom and the shower.

“You’re sure you don’t want to run in 2016?” Freddie asked.

At twenty-five, he looked like he still could pass for a teenager. He was tall and thin with a mop of black hair that might have been modeled after Paul McCartney’s early Beatle days. His face still had traces of baby fat around the jawline, but his eyes shone with an intelligence so radiant that looking at them directly was almost as hard as staring at the sun.

For most people, anyway. Marlene held their gaze without difficulty.

“I’m sure. I can wait. Five years isn’t a long time,” she said.

Marlene didn’t say she was unsure she could beat Jean Morrissey, especially with Tall Wolf working on the vice president’s side. In five years, if Morrissey kept her promise to serve only one term, there would be no formidable female candidate to oppose her. Marlene had scouted the political landscape to make sure of that.

As for now, she was content to cultivate Freddie. She would make him stronger and more practiced in the ways of the world. All in all, he would come to resemble Tall Wolf. Only without the adversarial edge. And with infinitely more money.

Money being the mother’s milk of politics, as a wise man from California once said.

She told Freddie, “A couple of years experience at Interior and then a step up in the next president’s cabinet, say State Department, will stand me in good stead for a run in 2020.”

“So you’re going to help Jean Morrissey?”

“Yes, and be a very good soldier.”

Tall Wolf would see Marlene’s underlying plan, both in her political choice and binding rich, young Freddie to her, but Tall Wolf wouldn’t try to block either move. Sooner rather than later, he might even begin to relax, thinking he’d become less important to her. Perhaps even feeling she’d lost interest in him.

That would never happen, of course. But if she could lull Tall Wolf’s suspicion of her so much the better. Her reverie vanished as a bright chiming sound disturbed the cozy silence.

“Text,” Freddie told her.

He took a phone out of a pocket in his robe and looked at the screen.

“My photographer,” he said. “The guy I sent out to scope the situation on my property.” Freddie frowned and looked at Marlene. “Some prick shot at him. Five times.”

Marlene stopped rubbing Freddie’s feet. “How did he get away?”

Freddie’s eyes scurried down the text and he laughed. “Beebs, that’s the photog’s name, hit the shooter with a stink bomb. Heard him howling as he ran away.”

Marlene moved Freddie’s legs to the floor, forcing him to sit up.

She told him, “So you were right. There are trespassers on your property.”

“Gotta be pot farmers,” Freddie said, “Climate’s wrong for coca plants and poppies. Could be somebody cooking meth, but we didn’t get the right heat signature for that.”

Freddie had commissioned a satellite survey of his property, just as a point of general curiosity. He wanted to get a different look at the land he’d bought. A photo analyst from the satellite company had told him, “You’ve got an infestation.”

She hadn’t meant ash borers or any other insectile pest.

“People. If they aren’t yours, chances are they’re up to no good. A drug operation is the most likely situation; a cult of paranoid and-or homicidal loonies is possible but less likely. Either way, you ought to call the cops.”

Freddie had decided to hold off on local law enforcement. He went to the woman who had approached him at a tech conference and told him she was going to run for president, saying she needed a billionaire to back her. She’d said she was going to give him the best sex he would ever have in his life. The offer of bliss, she said, came with no strings attached. If he wasn’t happy with it, she’d go away and find someone else.

At first, Freddie thought Marlene was too old for him. Then, like she could read his mind and he’d stepped into a movie, she became younger right in front of his eyes. Pretty good trick, he’d thought, and he wanted to find out how she’d done it. Besides that, he was sure no sex could be so
good that it would make him her lapdog.

He was pretty much wrong about that.

Being with Marlene was magical, sometimes in a truly scary way.

He still told himself he could leave her any time he wanted … only he hadn’t and it had been six months now. His new rationale became that even the best sex in the world had to get old eventually, and then he’d reassert his independence. It was going to happen any day, week or month now. In the meantime, he’d enjoy what he had.

So he went to Marlene for help dealing with the trespassers.

She thought it would be an impressive story to tell at her confirmation hearing, how she’d aided in breaking up a drug gang. Start her new job with a bang. She put Tall Wolf on the case.

Oh, and the idea to buy land around the country and give it away to native tribes?

Marlene had given it to Freddie.

“That’s pretty cool,” Rebecca told John as they settled into their hotel room, “buying land and giving it back to the original owners. Maybe some rich guy in Canada could do the same.”

John agreed. “Why not? Canada’s even bigger than the U.S. and it has one-tenth the population. Seems like you’d get a better deal on real estate up there.”

“Hey, our marquee cities, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, are plenty expensive and … other than that you might be right.”

As Rebecca took a look at the view from the room’s windows, John sat in an easy chair and lapsed into a thoughtful silence. Without turning to look at him, Rebecca asked, “That’s Puget Sound out there, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said, giving the question only fractional attention.

Rebecca turned and looked at him. “You’re deep in thought, huh? Should I wait or ask if it’s any of my business?”

John refocused as she took a seat opposite him. “Your comment about Canada following Freddie Strait Arrow’s lead made me think maybe the idea wasn’t Freddie’s at all.”

“No? Whose then?” She made the leap, not needing John to answer. “Marlene?”

He nodded.

John had told her of his suspicion that Marlene was Coyote. He’d been ready for the notion to make him the butt of any number of jokes. Still, he’d thought it too important a part of his life not to share with his prospective wife. To his relief, she didn’t think she might be marrying a lunatic.

She’d loved reading stories of the supernatural as a girl, and several of them had involved native cultures. For a while, she’d thought she might become a cultural anthropologist, like John’s mother. Rebecca thought the shared intellectual affinity was another sign she and John were meant for each other.

That idea was a bit too Oedipal for John to examine closely, but he was glad he’d been forthcoming and his revelation hadn’t become a point of ridicule.

“I have something else to tell you about Marlene,” he said, “but I’d prefer that you keep it to yourself.”

“Something
beyond
her being Coyote? That’d be a little much, wouldn’t it?”

“She intends to run for president of the U.S. Not next year, I think, but the cycle after that.”

That left Rebecca momentarily speechless. Then she said, “Well, Coyote or not, you’ve got to admire the woman’s ambition. How do you feel about that?”

“Decidedly ambivalent,” he told her. “If she took the country’s interest to heart, I think she’d run rings around the rest of the world. But Coyote’s main and abiding interest is herself. She might take it into mind to work for the repeal of the 22nd Amendment, the one limiting a president to two terms of office. I can imagine her going after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s record, and beating it substantially.”

“Well, the obvious counter-move to that is you’d have to run against her.”

Despite an attempt to keep a straight face, the corners of Rebecca’s mouth turned upward.

That wasn’t enough to keep John from shuddering at the thought.

“Much as I love my country,” he said, “I don’t know if I’d be up to that.”

Rebecca moved away from the window and sat on the arm of John’s chair, draping an arm around his shoulders. “You’d do it if you had to.”

“Maybe if we were well settled into our marriage by then; this country doesn’t elect bachelors. And that would mean …”

“I’d have to migrate south and become a U.S. citizen. I joked with my lawyer about doing as much.”

John reached up and put a hand on hers. “You could always visit your family when you felt the need. Canada is right next door.”

She nodded. “It’d be an adjustment, but I think I could do it. You know what would bother me the most though, don’t you?”

John said, “Yeah, I do. The idea of losing a fight and being exiled from the RCMP.”

“Right. Just the thought makes me want to have another go at Serge Marchand.”

“Come on now. Leave him the one nut he has.”

Rebecca laughed. She kissed John. “You are very good for me.”

“Does that mean you’ll go trekking the Cascades with me, looking for dangerous characters?”

Rebecca said, “We didn’t talk about it yet, but do I get to carry a weapon?”

John nodded. “Sure. I’m not looking for a firefight, but you never know what might happen. If any lowlife gets shot, though, it’d probably be better if I took credit.”

“Okay, but if I have to bag a marauding bear or lion, I get to keep the trophy.”

“Deal,” John said.

As the sun sank in the sky, it took the air temperature down with it. Valeria and Ernesto sat on the ground opposite each other in a clearing with the makings of a large unlit campfire in between them. A resourceful woman, Valeria even had matches with her. Since arriving in the mountains, she’d made a point of buying or filching everything she could from the camp’s supplies. She’d amassed quantities of packaged snack food, needles and thread to mend garments, aspirin and other pain-killers the
campesinos
used to extend their hours of toil. She’d thought all of it might be useful, if she and Ernesto ever tried to make an escape from the camp.

She dearly would have loved to pilfer a canteen. That would be just the thing to hold water on a trip through the wilderness. But the only things the workers had to drink from were cheap plastic cups. They cracked easily and were replaced after each communal dinner.

Valeria did manage to buy an extra pair of socks for herself and Ernesto from the meager stipend each worker received on top of his or her debt repayment credit. She also purchased a book of matches from a fellow who smoked, tobacco not marijuana. The workers were not allowed to partake of the crop they grew, processed, guarded and shipped.

Stoners were not known for their diligent work habits.

Valeria’s idea of making an escape was more fantasy than reality. Still, the delusion that her fate was hers to determine made it easier to get through each day. She was unable simply to grind out her time of bondage the way Ernesto did. She had never been a marine.

Not really expecting an opportunity to flee to present itself, all of Valeria’s spare food, medicine and even the map she’d drawn from her memory of the trip up into the mountains had been left behind in the corner of the tent in which she and Ernesto had slept. But she kept her matches in her pocket, a talisman as much as objects with the purpose of starting a fire.

So she had the matches with her when Ernesto had been befouled by the stink bomb and she’d been assigned the chore of making him tolerable company again. She knew how the others regarded Ernesto, an oaf with a sad excuse for a mind and no sense of simple good manners much less social graces. Still, he was someone who, beyond all understanding, had won the heart of a beautiful woman.

Ernesto cultivated the misconception of who he was as carefully as the others grew the marijuana. He’d explained himself to Valeria just one time, the day he’d saved her life.

“Better your enemies should think of you as a dwarf not a giant.”

She’d wondered if he’d learned that from the marines or his father, but never asked.

Sunshine turned into twilight and Ernesto told his wife, “There is no one nearby, except for maybe that bear. I think if we’re careful it will be safe to light our fire now.”

Valeria fastened on to the first half of her husband’s message.

“You really think a bear is following us?”

Ernesto saw she clearly hoped he was playing a joke on her.

To her regret, though, she knew that wasn’t his way.

“I haven’t seen it yet, but I have heard it. It’s too big to be a mountain lion.”

Valeria’s voice quavered. “Do bears eat people?”

“I imagine they eat whatever they want. Perhaps we shouldn’t have washed the stink off ourselves. Then we might have smelled like spoiled food. Something unfit to eat.”

“Stop it,” she said. “I’m already scared.”

“I have my rifle, and that furry fellow is not quiet. He doesn’t need to be. He’s big, strong, fast and loud. Nothing in this forest is hunting him. But if he comes for us, I will shoot him between his eyes. That will take down any creature, great or small.”

“What if you fall asleep?”

“I won’t.”

“Neither will I.”

“Light the fire,” Ernesto said. “No one besides the bear will see it.”

Valeria needed only one match to get a blaze going. Looking past the flames, she told Ernesto, “I want to sit next to you.”

He asked, “If you were sitting next to me, and the bear did come, what would you do?”

“Pray to Jesus to save me.”

“Sí,
but what else?”

“Hold you as tight as I could.”

“Exactly. Not a good idea when I’d have to move very fast to get my shot off.”

Valeria was too proud to sulk, but she was clearly not happy. “How many nights will we have to spend in this wilderness? I don’t think I can take too much of this.”

“Other than the bear, and maybe the lions and wolves in these mountains, is there anything else that scares you?” Ernesto asked.

Valeria lifted her chin and shook her head.

Ernesto said, “What worries me is what we’ll do when we get
out
of the wilderness. The men who have us peasants grow their marijuana will be looking for us. Even if they don’t find us, we will still have to find a way to survive in a new country we have entered illegally.”

Valeria stared at her husband through the dancing light of the flames.

“You don’t wish to go back to the camp, do you?” She found that idea hard to believe.

Ernesto said, “I do, but not in the way you think.”

“What other way is there?”

“To go not as a
campesino
but as a
ladrón.”
A thief.

Valeria didn’t understand. “What is there to steal? Bales of marijuana. We could not carry them and run away.”

Ernesto shook his head. “The bosses, Julián and that idiot Basilio, have a great deal of money in the camp. They keep it against the day they have to purchase
their
freedom from any gringo police who might find them. I have not seen it, but I know the men who protect it. They say there must be millions of dollars in cash.”

That made Valeria stop and think. “Can you take it from them, so much money?”

“I don’t know if we can carry it all. I’ve never seen so much money myself. But we can certainly make off with a lot of it.”

“Get out of here and be rich?” Valeria asked. “That would be wonderful. But we’d have to hide from Julián’s compadres and the bosses in Mexico. Maybe we can go to Canada. That is not so far away.”

Ernesto shook his head. “Too cold, colder than here. I am thinking Belize.”

They worked out their plans deep into the night.

The bear chose not to bother them, but their empty stomachs growled.

If the bear should make an appearance, maybe they’d eat him.