“What’s wrong? You look funny. Are you going to vomit?” Stag looked around at his wonderfully glossy, polished wood interior. “Because this is a new car with all-leather seats and I can open the door in a hurry.”
Clearly a man who kept his priorities straight. The breeze of the air conditioner grabbed her, and Kateri shivered. “I’m cold.”
He touched her forehead. “You’re clammy.” He started the car and flipped on her seat heater. “You were in a wreck. You’re in shock.”
“None of the other officers are in shock.” Testy. She was testy.
“No one else was shot four days ago.”
She put her hand on her side. “It’s nothing.”
“I’ve been shot. It’s never nothing.” He put the car in reverse, made an efficient three-point turn and headed toward town. “It’ll take us about an hour, hour and a half to get to the hospital, so close your eyes and try to get some sleep.”
“I want to know what’s happening.” She sounded like a fretful child.
One hand on the wheel, he reached around and clicked a switch. The police scanner blared to life, then faded, then blared, then faded, but from the jumble of voices, the news didn’t sound good. “In these mountains, it’ll be in and out, mostly out.” He reached back again and clicked it off.
“Why do you have a police scanner?”
“I like to keep track of my girlfriend.”
Her mind clicked along to the next thought. “John Terrance has a police scanner, doesn’t he?”
“Most likely.”
“We could … do something with that information. Something … sneaky. Fill the scanner with misinformation.”
“Isn’t that as likely to confuse your men as John Terrance?”
“We have a secure channel … you didn’t hear that.” She took a couple of breaths and felt herself relax.
“John Terrance will likely figure out what you’re doing.”
“Yes, but maybe that’ll help us catch him and even if it doesn’t, won’t he be frustrated?”
Stag laughed, warm and deep.
She had a plan. A stupidly obvious easy plan, and Stag had helped her figure it out. “Remind me later to tell my cops.”
“I will. I’ll even make up some fake stories for you.”
“That would be lovely.” She looked at his profile and appreciated how intently he concentrated. He drove well, not like Moen on the chase, but smoothly, competently, speeding around corners as fast as he could without tossing her from side to side.
The car’s interior was nice. Really nice, with a computer console that looked vaguely like a Star Trek Enterprise control panel. From the latest movie. The new-car scent made her dizzy. Or maybe it was the bleeding. Or maybe it was Stag’s scent. Whew. She closed her eyes. She thought she dozed.
John Terrance and his son … bullies, the kind who liked to harass women on the street, to fight when they were the only ones with firearms. Worse, they made meth, sold it all over Western Washington, were responsible for all the misery that addiction caused … and made a fortune. They owned the fast car, they owned the speedy boat, they escaped … but now John Jr. was dead. No one would mourn him except his father, and his father would mourn. His father would wage war on her and her men …
Kateri had a vision of John Terrance Sr., skinny, dirty, leering, eyes aflame, screaming he would come after her, rape her, hurt her, make her sorry. She heard his voice in her head … “I’ll leave you more deformed than you already are!”
She came awake on the whiplash of that nightmare.
Stag must have been watching, because he asked, “How is Rainbow?”
Kateri breathed to calm her racing heart.
He repeated, “How’s Rainbow?”
“Rainbow?” Kateri tensed, fought the drug, then inevitably relaxed again. “Dying. She’s dying.” Oh, God. Percocet helped the pain in her ribs. It did nothing for the pain in her heart.
He glanced at her. “The story I heard is that since meeting the frog god, you can bring people back from the brink.”
Because Stag was Native American, she was comfortable talking with him about the gifts the frog god had forced upon her. “With her, I can’t. There’s no elegant way to do it. I have to blast life into a dying body. I’ve only done it a couple of times—once was my dog—and only when it was almost too late. If I blasted life into Rainbow, I’m afraid it’ll be like blowing too hard on a dying flame. It will flicker out.”
“You’re afraid to try.”
“Don’t accuse me. Try to understand—I can’t take the chance I’ll kill her. She brought me into this world.”
He’d been kind of guiding the conversation, giving her something to think about besides pain and worry. Now he was clearly riveted. “What?”
“Rainbow delivered me. She arrived in Virtue Falls, a kid with a backpack and a woven blanket and nothing else to her name, and of course my mother took her in. My mother was always taking in strays…”
“Including your father?” Stag slowed the car.
She felt the gentle bump as the wheels hit the pavement. “Yes. Perhaps. But that was like offering to carry the scorpion across the river. When she had helped him, loved him, adored him, given him everything of herself … When he had sucked all the life and youth out of her … he walked away. She never recovered.” Her mind wandered to memories of her mother, of the smiles, the love, the time spent together … the well-hidden unhappiness, the slow disintegration into alcoholism, the broken body and soul.
In a gentle voice, Stag said, “You were telling me about your mother and how Rainbow delivered you.”
Kateri focused. “Right. They went out to dig clams by the full moon. Mom was pretty pregnant—her due date had been the week before…”
“Good God. It was night? She was overdue? And they went out to the beach to dig clams?”
“Once I asked Rainbow what they were thinking and she said Mom was fat and uncomfortable and depressed about my father.”
“How old was your mother?”
“Eighteen when she met him.”
“And he was…?”
“I don’t know. In his thirties, I guess, visiting Virtue Falls for the game fishing. Of course she fell in love and gave up her V-card to him because she thought he was going to marry her. He romanced her for a couple of weeks, then when she asked about the wedding…” She looked up and out the window at the tops of the evergreens and the fringe of the sky. “He didn’t stay.”
“Jesus.” Even Stag, who had probably seen plenty of brutality, sounded shocked.
“He wasn’t about to sully his precious eastern white heritage with a short, black-haired, red-skinned Indian wife. What with being a blue blood and being married to a blue blood and having a pure blue blood kid.” Why was Kateri confessing her darkest, most painful secrets to Stag Denali? She never told anyone about her screwed-up heritage … must be the Percocet. Or maybe the experience of lying back in a warm, soft leather seat knowing someone was in charge and she didn’t have to tell him where to go or what to do or worry that Stag would blab her confessions to the world.
The side of his mouth was drawn up in a cynical crease. “What did this guy say when she told him she was pregnant?”
“She didn’t tell him.”
“Your father doesn’t know you exist?” Stag was shocked again.
“Do you want me to finish this story or not?” Snarling was unpleasant, although sometimes necessary.
“Right. One thing at a time. So your mom was overdue and depressed…”
“And nineteen years old and Rainbow was seventeen, and everyone told them the first baby always took hours of labor … so they headed out in Mom’s crummy old pickup down to Grenouille Beach—”
“Rough road.” He clenched the steering wheel hard.
“Right. They hit enough washboard to knock the teeth out of a woodpecker.”
“Woodpeckers don’t have…” He caught himself. “Never mind. What happened?”
“Once they got there, they made a fire out of driftwood and started digging clams. They planned a picnic, a feast in the moonlight. Mom always said the best clamming was in that place where the waves and the currents intersect, so that’s where she was digging. Rainbow was up the beach by the cliff and she said the waves were backing and forthing, as they do, and she was digging, and all of a sudden she realized it was quiet.” Kateri had heard the story so many times she could see it in her mind. “Deadly quiet. She looked up and saw this giant wave rise up over the top of my mother.” She lifted her hands and let them hover. “Rainbow screamed. Mom looked up in time to be slammed down to the sand. She disappeared. Just disappeared. The water rushed up the beach. Rainbow ran toward the spot where she had been. To hear Rainbow tell it, it was long minutes before my mother washed up at the tip of the wave.” Kateri allowed her hands to wilt down onto her chest. “When she crawled out, she was in labor.”
“What did Rainbow do?”
“Delivered me. I came fast. They’d brought a knife and a blanket. For the picnic. They used the knife to cut the cord and the blanket to keep me warm by the fire.”
Stag whistled softly. “I’ll bet when the elders heard that story, they made some interesting predictions about you.”
“As far back as I can remember, there was talk that I had been marked by the frog god. Like I wasn’t already marked enough for being half-white on the reservation and half-Indian in the Virtue Falls schools.”
Stag laughed, not like he thought it was funny, but like he understood all too well. “Get beat up a lot?”
“Conflict is a half-breed’s lot in life.” She managed the balance between pitiful and sarcastic very well. Years of practice had perfected the art.
Stag slowed, turned, hit a couple of speed bumps.
Lights flashed in her eyes; the car stopped and she could see the sign that proclaimed EMERGENCY ROOM in bright white and red.
He raised her seat back. “Ready to go in?” he asked.
“They’re going to yell at me. Then they’re going to hurt me.”
“That’s the price you pay for being a half-breed sheriff marked by the frog god.” He managed the balance between pitiful and sarcastic pretty well himself. “I’ll get the wheelchair.” He got out and leaned back in to say, “I liked that story, but someday you’ll tell me how you met your father.”
“I didn’t say I had met him.”
“Sometimes, Kateri, what you don’t say speaks as loudly as what you do.”