47

Liana stood at the back of the weather-beaten general store trying to give herself a pep talk. You’re a law enforcement officer, she told herself, you can do this. But when she tried to move, her legs wouldn’t cooperate. She stood frozen in fear. Assault rifles and pistols wouldn’t be able to reach her at this distance, but a .30-06 with a scope was a different story.

She’d been racking her brain for an alternative, something more clever than merely walking out into the open and crossing the divide between the main building and the shed. Some kind of trick that would outsmart the snipers, their high-powered rifles, and their bullets that traveled faster than the speed of sound. Unfortunately, her best plan was to run as fast as she could.

Liana’s grandmother, being a traditional Diné, didn’t care much for belegana television. She did, however, occasionally get interested in certain programs. One in particular was the show MythBusters. On one particular episode of MythBusters, Grandmother had been fascinated by a test they did suggesting that you got just as wet running through the rain as you did calmly walking. Liana couldn’t wrap her mind around how that could be true, but perhaps there was something to it.

Was it possible she would draw less attention just walking over to the shed calmly and returning with the battery? Or maybe she should go for something in between. A light jog, perhaps.

You’re stalling, she told herself.

Again, she tried to move, but still her legs wouldn’t cooperate. She needed a better plan, but there wasn’t time. Frank was bleeding out in there.

Finally, after a moment more of inner turmoil, some deep reserve of hidden courage pushed Liana forward, out into the open, into the danger zone. She felt crosshairs crawling over her body and tried to imagine what was happening right now down in Canyon’s encampment. None of the underlings would fire without their commander’s go-ahead. The kill or no-kill order. Which meant that her life was in the hands of John Canyon.

Halfway there, she thought.

With the way the road curved up the bluff and the positioning of the buildings, Canyon and his gunmen would have a clear view of her from their roadblock. It was only fifty feet from the trading post to the shed, but to her, it felt like a marathon.

Three-quarters of the way, she thought.

She allowed herself to hope.

If Canyon was going to give an order to shoot, he would have surely done it by now.

Five steps. Three. Two.

Then, she was there, throwing open the side door of the rickety shed and leaning against the side of her Ford Explorer patrol vehicle as she tried to catch her breath and keep her body from shaking apart. She held out her hands, and she shook like a Parkinson’s victim. Liana hadn’t been a tribal police officer for all that long, but she had still been in some tough situations. She had pulled her gun a couple of times during sketchy traffic stops. She had arrested plenty of people for illegal alcohol and possessions of guns, drunken disorderlies, domestic disputes, the usual gamut. But there had been no murders in their area. At least, nothing that she had dealt with. Or knew about.

Liana reckoned that meant that those fifty feet and those few seconds it took her to cross the divide was the closest she’d come to death in her entire life. Obviously, Canyon had chosen to spare her, or the snipers would have taken her down. But her racing mind considered another possibility. Perhaps it had all happened so fast, despite it feeling so slow to her, that the mercenaries had no time to react and didn’t have enough time to get the shoot or no-shoot order from their superior. They had likely already been given instructions to take any possible shot at Frank, but she was a different story. And that would imply that the real danger would be in moving back from the shed to the trading post.

As she popped the hood of the Explorer and retrieved the car battery, she tried not to think about the harrowing run she would have to make back to the relative safety of the trading post. She tried not to think of how she would also be lugging a stupid car battery as she went and still she had no idea what any of this was for or if she was merely risking her life for the delusions of a half-dead madman.