Tribal Ways

4

Everyone was staring at Annja, with nothing resembling a smile or eye twinkle in sight. She was quite aware she may have just said the wrong thing.

It was the classic situation where any attempt at explanation could only make things worse.

“Right, then,” she said. “Sorry to intrude. My car broke down. My cell phone isn’t getting a signal.”

She held the offending object up by her face and waved it. “I’ll just borrow the phone, make a quick call and get out of your…way.”

She was deliberately playing typical airhead tourist, in hopes they’d think her an idiot too innocuous to be worth bothering with. Not a great plan. But no really great options jumped up to present themselves, either.

She stepped up to the bar, noting that the two burly men next to her had colors on the backs of their old-school bad-biker denim jackets that showed an Indian warrior bestriding an Indian motorcycle—it looked suspiciously like the bike parked out front—shooting a bow. The legend on the back of the nearer biker read Iron Horse People MC, Comanche Nation. The other was similar, but substituted Kiowa for Comanche.

The bartender was a white guy, skinny as an alley cat, with craggy features and wild white hair. He looked white, anyway. Annja knew of numerous people who’d been born into full membership of their respective tribes who looked no more native. His blue eyes were piercing and unwelcoming when they turned on Annja. He didn’t ask her pleasure.

“May I borrow the phone, please?” she asked politely.

He jerked his head. “Pay phone,” he said. “Booth in the back.”

She raised a surprised eyebrow. In this cell-phone era pay phones were becoming an endangered species.

“It’s a dead zone,” said the biker who stood farther away from Annja to her right. He was a big bearlike guy with his black hair hanging free to his shoulders in twin braids.

“And we like it that way,” said the man next to her.

With a shock Annja noticed, more than a beat late, one of the very sort of details she was normally adept at picking up on quickly—he wore a semiautomatic pistol holstered on his left hip. A SIG-Sauer, she thought. She realized just about everyone in the bar was packing.

She was pretty sure it was a violation of Oklahoma law to carry a firearm into an establishment that served alcohol. She decided not to bring it up.

Annja turned in the direction indicated by the bartender and headed for a niche sunk in a plank wall beside a faded and torn poster for a bullfight, in Madrid in September 1963.

Suddenly she found herself blocked by a figure a good three inches taller than she was. It was a woman, with hair bound back from a long, strikingly beautiful face with high exotic cheekbones and long, narrow eyes. She looked to Annja as if she came from a North Plains nation, Cheyenne maybe. Despite the weather outside, she wore a black tank top under a denim vest. Where lots of bikers sported U.S. flag patches she wore a yellow-and-red Gadsden flag. The one with the snake and the motto Don’t Tread on Me.

She had, Annja felt, a somewhat snaky appearance in general. She was smaller in the chest and hips than Annja, and moved with sinuous grace that suggested the serpentine. The metaphor was extended by tattoos that twined from her biceps down her bare brown forearms—rattlesnakes striking with fangs sticking straight out from their gaping jaws like Kiowa lances.

“Excuse me,” Annja said, and started to go around.

The woman seemed to flow in front of her again. “The white-eyes made us sign away our ancient right of roaming for reservations. Then they cheated us out of those and turned us out. So we tend to be a bit territorial these days. And you’re off your reservation here, white-eyes. This is Indian country,” she said.

“Yes, that whole land-grab thing sucked,” Annja said as conversationally as she could. “And neither of us was alive back then, so it’s probably way too late to debate it, isn’t it? Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

She sidestepped once again. To her relief the woman didn’t move to intercept her. Annja noted the 1911-style Springfield Armory .45 that rode in a black Kydex holster on her left hip. A gunfighter’s rig for an old-school gunfighter’s piece.

Annja made for the pay phone only to see that the bearlike guy had stopped playing pool and had slipped into the booth. She realized with a start that he didn’t have a shirt on beneath his own denim vest, and that his considerable paunch was covered in an intricate blue tattoo.

He showed her a happy grin. “Sorry,” he said with patent insincerity, trapping the handset between his shoulder and his ear. “I got to call my broker to see how much money I lost on stocks today. I’m still waitin’ on my personal bailout.”

He punched a number and pretended to listen. All the while he smiled beatifically at Annja out of his wide, round face.

She found it much scarier than the snake woman.

“You should probably go,” he said, as if as an afterthought.

After a moment Annja said, “You’re right.” She turned and started to walk out.

Discretion, in this case, was the better part of staying alive. Anyway I can hike to the highway much better if both my legs aren’t broken, she told herself.

A young biker emerged from a dark oblong opening in the back wall next to the phone booth. He was tall and straight, long-legged and narrow-waisted in his blue jeans, broad-shouldered in his colors. Unlike almost everybody else in the bar, men or women, he wore his long black hair unbound in a straight gleaming fall down his back. He was, undeniably, gorgeous.

From his carriage, from the way the feeling in the room suddenly shifted, he was clearly the boss. His dark-chocolate eyes locked on Annja’s. “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

She made a beeline for the door. Away from him.

She felt a strong hand clamp on her right biceps.

“Not so fast,” the biker chieftain said, spinning her around. “I got a few questions for—”

Annja used the momentum imparted by his yanking her around to jam her left knee into his groin really hard.

Okay, this is probably not the brightest thing you’ve ever done in your life, she thought even as she brought her knee up to its inevitable rendezvous with the juncture of those long, lean legs. It didn’t diminish in the slightest the sheer fierce satisfaction she felt. He had laid hands on her. Even in the lion’s den boundaries must be drawn, and rigorously enforced. Perhaps even more so. And Annja had not had a good day.

Clearly her victim didn’t remotely expect any such response to trying to turn the interloper around. The breath burst out of him and he doubled over, then collapsed to the floor.

Despite herself, Annja was impressed by her results.

Unfortunately the entire bar full of rough Indian outlaw bikers were too. And after a beat or two of goggling at their pack leader lying there helpless on the sawdust-covered planks—was that even in code?—they got pissed.

“She dropped Johnny!” a voice cried. “Get her!”

A heavy weight landed on Annja’s shoulders, staggering her. She reached back to grab a handful of coarse hair, then jackknifed forward, pulling hard. A figure flew over her back to slam on the planks in a cloud of sawdust. Annja saw it was a woman.

Hands clutched at Annja from several directions. A hand grabbed her jacket. Somebody yanked her hair. She slapped the hands away, lashing out with quick jabs and backfists. All the time she waded through the crowd toward the door.

As if materializing from the gloom itself the snake woman blocked Annja’s path. She grabbed a handful of Annja’s blouse through her open jacket and cocked her left fist back for a punch.

As she did she rocked her weight back. Annja grabbed the woman’s left wrist and stepped quickly forward with her right foot, stepping out so that her hip brushed the woman’s right hip. Her left hand shot up and around to grab the denim vest up near the slim neck. At the same time Annja pressed her elbow into her opponent’s upper arm, effectively fouling the blow.

Annja twisted hard counterclockwise, putting her hips and all the strength of her own long legs into it. The other woman was wiry-strong, but Annja was strong, too; and she’d been practicing her grappling techniques. With her own weight already going backward the taller woman was easily toppled over Annja’s outthrust hip and slammed flat on her back onto the pool table. Her head hit with a crack and the air rushed out of her.

For a moment the way cleared. Annja started to move for the door but the short, wide guy who’d occupied the phone booth now stood in her way.

A flash decision faced Annja. She had an ace in her sleeve, but it wasn’t one she cared to turn up in public. And also there were all those guns. If this confrontation turned lethal she’d be able to hope for nothing better than an honor guard to take into the afterlife with her.

Besides, even though these people were attacking her, Annja knew she was the intruder. And they hadn’t used weapons yet. Should the need arise, she knew she could summon her sword from the otherwhere. But she did not want to have to explain the sudden appearance of the weapon to a bar full of people.

But she was going to have to even the odds somehow. And that entailed a certain risk.

She grabbed a discarded pool cue that lay on the pool table near the moaning, disoriented snake woman and snapped it right over the wide guy’s cannonball head. He thumped to his knees, grabbed his head with both hands and howled.

She raced past him. Holding two feet of cue in a wide grip she used it as a riot baton or a pitchfork, prodding and levering bodies out of her path.

“Stop her!” Annja heard the leader call out. To her satisfaction she noticed his voice was still pretty choked.

But she was fast and very determined. She sent tables and chairs spinning to the sawdust in her wake, with a clatter of heavy glass and yeasty slog of beer arcing through the thick air. In a few steps she reached the door.

Tossing the broken cue aside she yanked the door open. She stepped into the teeth of a now-icy wind, hauling the door closed behind her.

If the pursuit didn’t develop too quickly she’d try to start the balky car and get as far as she could. If that didn’t pan out she’d run off into the hills. Outlaw bikers weren’t famous for their cross-country running abilities. And their motorcycles, heavy and low-slung as a lot of them were themselves, were optimized for high-speed cruising on paved road. The opposite of dirt bikes, they’d quickly bog down in the rolling landscape.

Annja liked her chances of evading the Iron Horse People in the dark. Whatever they might like to pretend, they weren’t their ancestors, wild children of the wind, grass, sun and moon. They were products of the same modern cell-phone and flat-screen culture as she was.

She neared her car. And suddenly men stood from behind it. The bar sign’s jittery pink glow glistened on faces painted black.

And on the knives and hatchets in their hands.

From the footsteps and angry shouts she understood a bunch more bad guys had crowded in between the vehicles behind her. She’d fled just in time.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw a brighter light stretched across the gravel from the direction of the bar’s sagging facade. The front door was opening.

A male voice bellowed, “Dog Soldiers!” Then a lot of shouting erupted inside the bar in a guttural language she didn’t understand.

That was the most fortuitous diversion she could ever have hoped for. She had a flare of hope that the sudden discovery of the Dog Soldiers, whoever they were, and the consternation that caused among the Iron Horse People, would cleanly cover her getaway.

She heard handgun shots popping from the parking lot. The deep hard-edged boom of a shotgun answered from inside the bar.

Annja never broke stride. She had her plan and she followed through. She ran straight to the back of the bar, cut around behind it and then, when she was sure she was out of everybody’s sight, beelined right up a low ridge nearby and was gone with the wind.

5

Even though Annja’s GPS built into her phone stayed AWOL, she was not lost.

She could see the bright yellow glow of Lawton to the east. The clouds actually made that a better beacon by providing a handy surface for the lights to reflect off. As long as Annja kept that glow, the largest in the vicinity in any direction, on her right, she knew she was heading north toward the graded-earth country road and eventually the highway.

She wondered whether the two groups of crazy outlaws back at the bar might sort things out enough to give chase to her. It was so frigid in the wind and rain that it felt as if her bones would break. She knew the bikers might be the least of her problems.

Every time the chill grew intolerable she picked up the pace a notch.

Even though she reckoned later she hadn’t been hiking even twenty minutes—after what seemed an eternity—she reached the county road. She walked on, hoping to eventually get a signal on her cell phone.

Approaching from the right, a quarter mile off, she spotted a pair of headlights.

Coming out of the east made it unlikely the car was chasing her from the bar. There was always the frightening possibility that it might contain reinforcements for either set of her enemies.

That concern died away as she saw the Lawton sky-glow refract through the light-bar atop the car as it neared her. It slowed as if to come to a stop beside her.

Even before it did, Annja recognized, illuminated by the multicolored lights of the onboard computer and dashboard, the indefatigably cheerful face of Lieutenant Tom Ten Bears.

“Little cold out to be hitchhiking, ain’t it, Ms. Creed?” Ten Bears asked.

“Yes,” she said, hugging herself tightly against the biting cold. She wasn’t really in the mood for a lot of ironic repartee.

“Hop on in and get warm, why don’tcha?” he asked.

She could think of any number of reasons why she wouldn’t, actually. None of them was as compelling as either getting out of the cold or putting the symbolic bulk of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol between her and the bikers and midnight ambushers. She wasn’t naive enough to believe a lone trooper in a cruiser would necessarily deter them. But along with his .41 Smith & Wesson, Ten Bears had a radio.

She settled into the passenger’s seat. Beaming between his uniform collar and his peaked cap, Ten Bears put the cruiser back in gear and drove off along the county road at a just-over-walking pace.

She regarded him through narrowed, suspicious eyes. “Small world, huh?”

“Small world,” he agreed. “Welcome to Indian country, Ms. Creed. Not much goes on here that folks don’t see. What they see, they like to talk about. Especially when you’re a white-eyes from outside. And most especially a real nice-looking lady white-eyes, if you get my drift.”

Annja knew full well that the coming of any stranger would spark gossip in a tight-knit community. While Annja didn’t think of herself as particularly beautiful, she knew that her tall, lean-muscled, leggy form tended to attract added attention that, say, a dumpy fifty-year-old bearded archaeologist would not.

“I heard some things got me kind of concerned,” the lieutenant said. “I checked your motel but you weren’t there. Them Comanche County deputies told me you’d left the dig site right around sundown. So I wondered if you hadn’t broken down along the way. Or something.”

Or something, she thought. But carefully did not say.

“The breakdown scenario. My rental car died on me. I just managed to ditch it in the parking lot of the Bad Medicine Bar.”

“Hoo,” Ten Bears said. “Tell me you didn’t go inside?”

“No cell-phone coverage out there,” she said. “I didn’t think I had much choice.” She shrugged. “The reception I got didn’t exactly make me feel welcome. So I left.”

He laughed at that. “Them boys rowdy you up some?” he asked.

“Let’s say I got out of there before things got really out of hand,” she said with a grin.

“You’re a big TV star and all. Anything happened to you, it’d reflect poorly on the department and the Comanche Nation. Also you seem like a nice lady, if a bit idealistic,” he said.

“Thanks. I think.”

“See, there’s something going on in Indian country. Mostly western Oklahoma and northern Texas. Something not so good. We got some people here, young people, who are kind of on the radical side.”

He glanced at her. “You met some of them tonight. Iron Horse People Motorcycle Club.”

“I see.” She tried to keep her tone neutral.

“They got a rival bunch,” he said, “call themselves the Dog Society. Both sets want to live in the good old days, you know? Ride around whooping and hollering and shooting buffalo. They don’t much like the government. Okay, nobody does. They are also not too fond of the white-eyes.”

He drove a moment in silence. To their right the land began to pitch up into rough granite hills. Ten Bears didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get anywhere. That he was heading away from Lawton didn’t particularly alarm Annja. She had fairly well-honed survival instincts. She didn’t sense anything sketchy from Ten Bears, just concern.

She knew he wasn’t telling her everything. Police never told outsiders everything about a live investigation. It didn’t mean much.

“Most of all they don’t like each other,” he continued. “There’s trouble between ’em. Regular trouble. Lots of bad blood. And it’s getting worse.”

“I don’t ever see anything about this on the news,” Annja said.

“I hope you don’t, Ms. Creed.” He looked at her. “I hope you won’t be going public with it.”

“Not much danger of that,” she said with a little smile. “I’m an archaeologist, not a reporter.”

“Nation’s trying to keep it all quiet. So’s the state. The Comanche Nation’s got this new casino opening up in a few days, you know. Your young bloods, the radical-traditional types, aren’t happy about that. It’s Indian business and white-eyes don’t much care. Anyway, if word of the problem does get out, what with the whole continuing terror hysteria and all, it’s just going to bring more grief to Indians without calming the passions that are causing the problems.”

“I understand,” she said.

“Most people here are good folks. Indians, whites, blacks, Asians, whatever. But there are strong under-currents of racism and anger. And plenty of areas where white-eyes aren’t in the majority. And not real popular. You know?”

“I got the impression.”

He chuckled softly.

“So why don’t I give you a ride back to the motel,” Ten Bears said amiably. “I’ll talk to the car rental company. You can call them in the morning to retrieve your broke-down ride and get a new one. Better still, why not just fly on back to New York City, get yourself some nice arugula?”

“I’m not a big arugula fan, Lieutenant. I’m more the unabashed carnivore. I promise I won’t interfere with your investigation. I’ll do my best to keep from turning up on the news for any reason whatever. But I lost a good friend today. I’m not ready to pack it in and head home.”

She turned away from him and wiped moisture from her cheek. The ghostly fun-house-mirror image of her face looked back at her with exaggerated eyes. Snowflakes beat against the windows like suicidal moths bent on flame.