How can she believe that stuff? She went to college! .
How had she forced him out of her house when he didn't want to leave? And how come ever since then, any time he dialed her number, no matter what phone it was from, he always got the "your call did not go through" message? She hadn't changed her number, and it happened even when he went through the operator. The operator had been just as confused, and had muttered something about a short in the line.
On the whole, for the last day or so, things had not been happening according to David's idea of a logical and predictable universe. In a perverse sense, he would have liked to blame it all on Jennie, but he doubted that she had gone out and dug holes in Calligan's land for equipment to fall into. Short of ascribing supernatural powers to her. . . .
Dammit. And what the hell do they mean by "old man Talldeer's training her right?'' Now that he thought about it, hadn't her message said something about being her grandfather's apprentice? Shit, maybe she did believe all that crap!
The entire bunch was looking at him now, waiting for him to say something.
He almost grimaced, and covered it in time. No matter what he said, he lost in some way. If he told them not to talk to Jennie or the old man, he'd lose them completely. They had that shaky, panicked kind of look about them. Then they'd go do whatever Jennie told them to do.
"Well," he said slowly, keeping his expression just a shade on the dubious side, "you can talk to the Talldeer girl if you want, if you're really going to insist on it, but if you do, don't be surprised if everything you tell her shows up as evidence on Calligan's side when he takes you all to court. You know she's a private eye, and none of us know who hired her, but I'd bet on Calligan before I'd bet on anyone else. And anything she hears, if it has any bearing on the explosion, she has to tell the cops."
I wouldn't, but she will. Little People, my ass.
"What's she gonna tell him?" the man asked, scornfully. "That we think the jerk's got a curse on him? She already knows that, and so does he! We told him to his face, more than once! And last time I looked, curses weren't admissible in court!"
Ah hell, I have lost them. Bitch.
They turned their backs on him and began deciding who was going to approach the Talldeers, and whether they were going to go straight for the old man or work through the girl first. He finally got up and left; it was obvious that he'd lost this round.
Time for round two. He pushed through the stockroom door and passed through the front of the smoke shop, empty except for the cousin at the counter. The cousin kind of grunted good night; he returned the courtesy, and walked out into the earlier dusk. His car was off to one side of the tiny parking lot, under a cottonwood.
He hadn't meant to start clandestine operations this soon, but it looked as though he wasn't going to have any choice. Whether or not Jennie was working with Calligan was' moot. If she was-well, he was about to show these guys how stupid they were being. If she wasn't-
Then at least he'd have collected some other evidence. People always left paper trails; they couldn't help it. There would be something in that office he would be able to use, if only by-leaking it to the press.
He had the document camera, the rubber gloves, and the lock-pick set all hidden in the side panel of the front door of his Jeep. Tonight would be a good night to go raid the office at the site. The cops had all gone away, and with the workers back on the job, Calligan had no reason to be nervous. And no one with any sense broke into a site office; there was never anything worthwhile there. Not even pawnshops took electric typewriters anymore. That, and oversized calculators and beat-up old office furniture was all anyone ever kept at a site office.
And, of course, records. . . .
Not that I've ever been caught, he thought, not bothering to hide a smirk, since he was halfway to his car and there wasn't anyone to see it. Damn, I'm good. . . . We'll just see if there's something in those records at the site that leads back to Jennie-or anything else that can be used against Calligan himself.
Kestrel-Hunts-Alone was on the hunt-armed to the teeth, metaphorically and spiritually speaking-crouched at the edge of the fence surrounding Calligan's construction site. It was very dark out here with no moon and only the light of the stars and very distant streetlights, but she wasn't depending entirely on her night vision. She had already spent some time here before sundown, memorizing the positions of bits of cover, planning the route she would take to get to the ground that had held the relies.
Both she and Mooncrow had decided that it was time to do a little more investigation; after dark, during the Little People's most active hours, this time. Mooncrow had armored her to the best of his ability, and she had layered on her own protections and "assurances" on top of his. At best, the Little People would recognize her as an ally against the real enemy. At worst, she had enough defenses that she would not need to fear their anger.
She hoped.
There was only one way to be sure, however, and that was to test it all under fire, in the field.
No one had plowed anything else up since the explosion, but that was because Calligan had put off digging any further into the disputed corner until after the forensics and university people got done checking the area out. Calligan was pretending to cooperate; at least, she thought it was pretense, despite his claim that he had contacted people at O.U. to come check out the disputed area. Of course, he could have assumed that the explosion had powdered every relic left. He could be assuming-probably correctly-that O.U. was too short on money to send anyone to do a real archeological investigation. Or he could have come in on his own and removed everything-it would have been a little harder with the cops here, but it could have happened.
One thing was certain; if she could rely on her own Medicine senses, this place was not a real burial site. She had sought visions here both while in her car and crouched at the edge of the fence as near to that corner as she could get. There simply weren't any of the appropriate signs, or the proper "feel" to the place. There had been a faint echo that something had been kept there, briefly-and there seemed to be a bright point, as if there was still some kind of relic out there, but it was all in one place, not spread out as it would be if this really were a burial ground. But there was nothing more, and she was not going to go into a full Medicine trance in a place where she was so physically vulnerable. So-that probably meant that what had already been dug up was a cache of some kind, as she had guessed. And she needed to find out now if there were any more caches out here, or if that point of power meant only a relic or two still intact after all the turmoil. Even one object would tell her if what had been dug up had actually come from the Osage cairns.
The only way she could do that was now, at night, when there would be no one around to interfere-or try to blow her away for uncovering their stash.
She slipped under the wire fence-ridiculously easy to do, since it wasn't anchored very firmly, and it was obviously there just to define the area of construction and not to form any kind of protection.
Didn't Larry tell me that there'd been some missing supplies? I'm not surprised, if this is the level of their security. An amateur could break in here.
She froze for a moment, scanning the area, then scuttled silently to another patch of cover, a stack of something with a tarp over it.
Working her way carefully across the site, moving from shadow to shadow, occupied all of her attention. She did not bother to "watch" for Little People; if they wanted her, they would be able to ambush her without any difficulty. They were spirits, after all, and it was rather difficult to keep a spirit from materializing in front of you if it wanted to!
She had gotten halfway to the "forbidden" corner, when she realized that she was not alone.
And whoever was out here was at least as good at being "invisible" as she was, or she would have noticed him? her? long before this. In fact, the only reason she had spotted the other invader was because he had run in front of a light-colored piece of equipment just as she looked at it.
Oh shit!
It occurred to her then, as she cowered in the shadow of a huge bulldozer and watched for some sign that she had been spotted, that she just might have run into the original looter. If there was an "original looter." The signs sure pointed to one. And if so-he would also be the most likely candidate for saboteur, trying to wreck the equipment before it dug up his cache.
Just what I needed for my birthday. The guy who wired a dozer with dynamite and killed four people. Not likely he's going to play nice and surrender if I catch him. Not likely he's going to congratulate me on my expertise if he catches me!
Assuming this person was human at all. That was. not a good assumption,, really. The Little People could take on all the attributes of a flesh-and-blood human when they chose, and there were other spirits that could do the same.
This might not be a looter, a saboteur. This might be something much worse.
She was afraid to move, lest she be spotted, and afraid not to move. She certainly couldn't stay here forever! She strained her eyes against the darkness, but she couldn't make out much more than a darker shadow against a pile of sand or gravel. If she hadn't seen him move there, she wouldn't have known he was in that blotch of .darkness. She'd never have guessed that the shadow was alive if she hadn't seen it in action.
Then it moved again; so quickly that her heart jumped up into her throat. It was spooky; maybe a couple of pieces of gravel fell, but otherwise the lurker was silent. It was heading over in the direction of the roped-off corner.
So, does that mean it's the looter, another would-be scavenger, one of the Little People, or somebody else altogether?
She followed, heart pounding, palms sweating, and wishing she had a night-scope.
Then it occurred to her that she did have a kind of night-scope, after all. The only problem was that it was hard to move if she went into the kind of mental state where she could See things, see the purely physical, and See Medicine things. If this other lurker was something other than human, he would really betray himself at that point. But she would be severely handicapped-
That's why you're a Medicine Woman, stupid. "Hard" doesn't mean "impossible. " Just try not to move too fast when you're double-sighted, or you'll trip over something.
She froze for a moment, putting herself in the right frame of reference.
She knew she'd matched it, when instead of only the shadow of a human lurking over by the dirt dug up by the new-wrecked dozer, she saw not only the stranger, but a stag, standing beside him.
Interesting. So her unknown had a medicine-animal self. At least that meant he wasn't one of the Little People; they didn't have medicine-animals, spirit-totems, since they were spirits. And it meant he was indeed a "he"-it was a stag, after all, and not a doe-and that he probably wasn't white. Although she had met white people who had medicine-creatures, there weren't many of them in the Tulsa area. He didn't fit the profile of someone who would be grave-robbing, either; a medicine-animal would have left him, if he'd done something as appalling as that. No one she knew had a stag for a medicine-animal. ...
But he didn't seem aware of his medicine-animal; at least, he paid no attention to it, staring instead very fixedly at something lying just inside the roped-off area.
That was really odd; how could he not know he had a spirit-guardian? And for one to appear, to try to force him to become aware of it, he had to be in some kind of danger. ...
The stag was very agitated, frantic; surely he had to feel somethingl Even if he was only marginally in touch with his spiritual self, he had to feel it! The stag kept alternating between threatening gestures with its horns toward the man's right, and pawing at the earth, threatening something there, where the man was looking.
She concentrated a little more, and narrowed her focus Whatever this is, it's very small-and I think it's in that area where I spotted something earlier.
Finally, something clicked, and she saw it, or rather, save the medicine-self that was the echo of its physical self.