When Liana Nakai was eight years old—after having seen Annie for the first time—she had prayed to the Great Spirit to take her away to live with a rich white man like the little girl in the movie. Upon waking the next morning, she had found her hogan empty and had feared the worst. She had imagined herself being used as a lesson for her people. The story of the girl who wished away the world. Her mother had been out tending to the blue corn that her family used to grow when they lived in the valley. Even though the fear had been nothing more than a shadow, the incident had given the eight-year-old Liana Nakai nightmares for months to come.
She had thought the lesson learned, but apparently, she had a bad habit of not being careful with her wishes. Right before the man calling himself Frank walked into the Roanhorse Police Outpost covered in blood, Liana had wished for a strong man to save her from the monotony of her dead-end life in this dead-end place.
She had been assigned desk duty on the slowest night of the week during the slowest shift of the week. The other three officers in her tiny department treated her like a child in need of protection, clinging to their people’s traditions of the proud male warriors protecting the feeble females.
Liana resented them tremendously for underestimating her. She could hold her own with any of her male counterparts physically, and she trumped them all in brains and schooling. Having received a degree in criminal justice, she often wondered how she ended up right back on the Rez, working as a tribal police officer and making a quarter of what she could have been making as a paralegal in one of the belegana cities.
But she supposed it was no mystery why she had come back. Grandmother was sick and refused to leave the only home she had ever known. Liana couldn’t really blame the old woman. At first, even she had been intimidated by the idea of living among the whites. There hadn’t been much of a choice. She couldn’t abandon Grandmother, and the fading matriarch refused to budge. So, for the foreseeable future, she was still confined to the cage she had been fighting to escape her whole life.
Liana had been expecting an uneventful night pretending to fill out reports while listening to an audiobook. Instead, only an hour into her shift, the door to the small station house burst open, and the most handsome man she had ever seen stepped inside. He wore a pair of blue jeans and no shirt. His exposed torso was all muscle and sinew, and fresh blood covered his whole body.
Her initial thought was that there had been an accident of some kind, but then she noticed the man’s demeanor. He wasn’t frantic or afraid. He seemed to be without a care in the world. A man without fear. Her police training told her that he must have been in shock.
“Sir, I need you to remain calm and tell me what happened. Were you in some sort of an accident?”
“Why do you ask? Oh yes, the blood. No, it’s not mine.”
“Then whose blood is it,” she said. Liana’s hand had been inching ever closer to the Glock pistol mounted on her hip. Placing her palm over the butt of the weapon, she added, “Sir, I’m going to need to see your hands.”
“How many officers are on duty right now? Are you the only one here?”
“Hands. Now,” Liana said as she pulled her pistol and trained it on the newcomer.
“If I wanted to report a crime, is there some sort of form I need to fill out?”
Liana took aim at a spot in the middle of the terrifying interloper’s chest. Keying the radio attached to her shoulder, she said, “Officer Nakai at the station. I need immediate backup.”
A voice she recognized as belonging to Officer Pitka replied, “Pitka, two minutes out. What’s the situation?”
“Possible homicide,” Liana said, her voice cracking.
The blood-covered belegana merely looked around the tiny station house as if he were there on some kind of routine business, just some guy filing a noise complaint or reporting the theft of a lawnmower.
“Sir, I’m not going to ask you again. Raise your hands slowly. No sudden movements.”
With a roll of his eyes, the man finally complied and raised his hands over his head. As he did, she noticed that he held two cylindrical objects in his hands. “What are you holding? Drop whatever it is right now, or I will have no choice but to fire.”
“I’m afraid that may be a bit of a problem. You see, these are glued into my palms. I couldn’t drop them if I wanted to.”
“Who would do something like that?” Liana said before she had even realized she had spoken aloud. There was nothing in the handbook, no training at the academy on how to handle a situation like this. Despite her degree and knowledge, her mind was a blank. All she could think to do was to keep her gun on the target and wait for the others to arrive.
The bloody man said, “Actually, I glued them there myself.”
“Why would you do that? And whose blood is all over you?”
“Yes, well, about that. I’m here to report a murder. Well, more precisely, several murders.”