Thief Of Souls

her neck.

“Take that off,” Radio Joe insisted.

Quickly the girl took off the chain, and held it out to him.

“Give it to him,” said Joe, “not me.”

Not understanding why, the girl handed the ring on a chain to her boyfriend.

“Save your ring for a girl who’s alive,” Radio Joe told the boy, “I mourn with you.” Then he raised his shotgun, and fired into the dark bull’s-eye of the girl’s right pupil.

Radio Joe next headed toward the field, where panic had begun to take over. Under the bright lights of the field, his chosen targets were easy to spot as they raced from the stands—he had memorized their faces, and their clothes. His own sobs of anguish now ululated like war cries as he raised the rifle, and picked them off one by one.

In the end, Radio Joe was harder to take down than the Toadlena quarterback.

***

Parker Chee, third deputy in the quiet, uneventful town of Shiprock, knew he was sitting nostril-deep in shit as thick as quicksand. This was a big deal. The kind of small-town nightmare that drags in the media vultures. When it comes to carnage of this magnitude, they descend with such ferocity, the whole town would be picked apart by morning. Thirty-two dead in a ram­page that appeared to be neither planned, nor random.

There was some method behind the old man’s madness that no one could yet guess.

“Damn shamans,” griped Sheriff Keedah. “They’re psychotic, every last one of them.” There was nothing worse in Chee’s book than a self-loathing Navajo. Keedah never missed an opportunity to berate his own people. Chee longed for the day Keedah was ousted, but in the meantime, Chee did his job, and kept a low profile. While most every other law en­forcement officer in the Navajo nation dealt with the crime scene, Chee was charged with minding the prisoner until he was taken away for the type of big-time arraignment reserved for the truly notorious of­fenders.

Chee found himself drawn to the old man in a sort of morbid curiosity he thought he’d gotten over in his live years on the force. He had seen his share of lu­natics, but this old man didn’t fit the mold. He had a clarity about him that was almost as disturbing as his bloodbath.

This massacre wasn’t the only disturbing thing that had happened this week. There had been a prelude. Chee had sensed a discomfort throughout the week with the citizens he came in contact with. It wasn’t everyone— just certain ones. Danny Yazzie, who he pulled over for speeding again; Addie Nahkai, who had a break-in; and more than a dozen others. Bad vibes—or more accurately, no vibes at all. Talking to them had been like talking to a wall. It’s not that they weren’t listening—it’s that they weren’t there. Chee would have let it go—attribute it to stress, or too little or too much caffeine—except for the fact that many of those people were now dead.

When the names of the dead began to come in, at first it seemed like coincidence, and then just plain creepy, that at least half of the people this crazy old man had singled out for execution had already made Chee’s “absentee” list. And so Chee knew he was in shit up to his high nostril hairs even before he went to visit the old man in his cell.

As Chee approached the holding cell, the old man, who identified himself only as “Radio Joe,” had calmly made the space his own. He had collected a host of dead flies and cockroaches from the corners of the cell and was now crushing them down into a fine black powder between his fingers.

“Congratulations,” said Chee. “You’ve just guaran­teed yourself the cover of this week’s Time.”

No response from the crag-faced old man. He crum­bled a beetle between his thumb and forefinger. Only now, as Chee came closer, did he see what the old man was doing. He was adding the pulverized exoskeleton to a fine-lined sand painting that was slowly expanding from the center of the cell.

“You think that’s gonna save you from the gas chamber?”

“Biye Gak misa dtaoopyu,” the old man said. “I do not fear death.”

In spite of his advanced age, Keedah had roughed up the old man in the interrogation room. Now his face was bruised, lips bloated, yet still he offered no words, no explanation as to why he had brutally massacred more than thirty people.

“If you have something to say, best to say it now,” Chee advised. “Before the feds come to take you away.”

“Let them come,” said the old man, without looking up from his sand painting.

Chee felt his fury rising, and approached the bars. “You killed innocent people, old man. Parents—children. Don’t you feel anything, you bastard?”

The old man was unperturbed. “I killed no one.”

“There were hundreds of witnesses—your prints are all over half a dozen weapons!”

“You cannot kill what is already dead.”

Chee swallowed hard. The shit was lodging deeper in his nostrils but he couldn’t pull himself away. “Ex­actly what’s that supposed to mean?”

“A shotgun leaves behind its spent shell. Worthless. Useless,” said the old man. “So does this Quikadi. The ghost-devourer. The spirit chupacabra.”

In any other circumstance Chee would have laughed at the suggestion. Chupacabra tales had been all the rage lately: red-eyed creatures that drained the blood of livestock. But what the old man was describing was not that same new-age vampire yarn. It was something completely different.

“You’re telling me you follow this . . . creature?”

“I clean the waste it leaves behind. I lay the dead to rest.”

“You’re crazy, old man.”

And for the first time, the man called Radio Joe looked up at him. He stood, coming forward, and sud­denly Chee realized the bars held no protection for him.

“Am I crazy?” asked Radio Joe. “You would not be here if you did not already know the truth.”

Chee wouldn’t answer to that. Wouldn’t dare think about it. “This thing—what does it look like?”

“It wears the body of a Hualapai,” Radio Joe said. “Twenty years old.”

“Man or woman?”

“Both.”

Chee took a step away, not even realizing he had done it. There had been such a specter in town the week before. They had picked him up on vagrancy, as Sheriff Keedah had zero tolerance for itinerants. When they found no reason to keep him, they let him go, but Chee kept an eye on him until he left town.

“You’ve seen it, then,” said Radio Joe.

“I saw something,” Chee admitted.

“Your sheriff’s soul was taken by it.”

Suddenly the cell key became a weight in Chee’s pocket. He could feel the heavy keychain pressing into the flesh of his leg.

“You killed thirty-two people!” screamed Chee. If he could have killed Radio Joe right there he would have, to spare himself from having to consider what he was about to do.

“Then let them take me away,” said Radio Joe calmly. “But the job will remain undone.”

Chee turned his back, trying to force his legs to take him out to the front office. The phones were ringing off the hook out there. Townsfolk tying up the lines; pressing them for information they simply didn’t have, or couldn’t give out until the next of kin were officially notified.

But the old man was right. Keedah was another “ab­sentee.” He was there in body, but not in spirit—and had been that way ever since his run-in with that genderless transient. Chee knew this to be true, and while Chee’s head told him his job was to confine this mur­derer, his gut told him something else entirely.

“Damn you,” whispered Chee. “Damn you to Hell.”

Then he turned to the cell, and slowly pulled his keychain from his pocket, inserting the cell key into the lock. The old man watched impassively. Chee turned the key in the lock until he heard the mechanism spring open. Then he removed the key, and returned to the front office, without giving the old man another look.

When Chee reached the front office, Keedah was standing there, in the midst of madly ringing phones.

“What the hell, Chee? What, are you on vacation?”