Kiss of the Bees

Arranging them side by side, Fat Crack laid the crystals and the cigarette and lighter out on the spread leather surface of the pouch, then he reached into his hip pocket and pulled out his wallet. Carefully he thumbed through the school pictures of his own children and grandchildren until he found the one Lani had given him the year before at Christmas.

He lit the cigarette and let the smoke swirl around him in the late-night breeze. There was no one sitting in the circle with him, but Fat Crack raised the cigarette and blew a puff of smoke in each of the four directions, just as Looks At Nothing had taught him, saying “Nawoj” as he did so.

While the cigarette still glowed in his fingertips, Fat Crack lifted up the first crystal and held it over Lani’s picture. Nothing happened. It was the same with the second crystal and with the third as well.

The sky was gradually lightening in the east and Fat Crack was already thinking how foolish he must look sitting there on the ground when he picked up the fourth crystal and held it over the picture. What happened then was something he could never explain. It simply was. The picture on the paper changed ever so slightly until something else superimposed itself over Lani’s smiling face.

At first Fat Crack thought he was seeing the head of a rattlesnake, its jaws open wide to swallow something, its fangs fully exposed. This was not a snake’s head. It was, in fact, a snake’s skull—ko’oi koshwa. Then, as Fat Crack leaned down to examine the picture more closely, he realized the picture underneath the skull seemed changed as well. In the slowly eddying smoke, he saw that Lani’s eyes were missing. Instead of eyes smiling back at him, there were only empty sockets.

The message from the divining crystals was clear. If Lani Walker wasn’t already dead, she soon would be.

Fat Crack’s hands shook as he carefully returned the crystals and lighter to the medicine pouch. He was just closing it and trying to decide what to do with this newfound, awful knowledge when the headlights from Richard Ortiz’s tow truck flashed across the yard. With an agility that surprised Fat Crack even as he did it, he heaved his hefty frame up off the ground and hurried toward the truck. He reached the rider’s door just as Wanda climbed out and turned to tell Richard good-bye.

“Oi g hihm,” Fat Crack said to his son, hoisting himself up into the seat Wanda had just vacated. Literally translated, oi g hihm means “Let’s walk.” In the everyday language of the reservation, however, it means “Let’s get in the pickup and go.”

“Where are you going?” Wanda demanded, catching the door before Gabe had a chance to close it.

“To Rattlesnake Skull Charco,” he said. “Call Brandon Walker and tell him to meet me there. Tell him that’s where we’ll find Lani. Tell him to hurry before it’s too late.”

“What’s wrong with Lani?” Wanda Ortiz asked in alarm. “Is she hurt, sick? What’s going on?”

“She’s been kidnapped,” Fat Crack answered without hesitation. “I believe she’s been taken by someone connected to the evil Ohb. If we don’t find her soon, that person is going to kill her, if he hasn’t already.”

Wanda nodded and stepped back from the truck. “I’ll call the Walkers right away,” she said.

Richard Ortiz shifted the tow truck into reverse. “We’re not talking more of that old medicine-man nonsense, are we?” he asked dubiously.

This was no time for a philosophical discussion. “Shut up and drive, Baby,” Fat Crack told his son. “And while you’re at it, put the flashers on.”

“You think it’s that serious?”

“You bet,” Fat Crack told him. “It’s a matter of life and death.”

Quentin had come back to the cavern, picked up the second load of pottery, and had gone to carry it back down the mountain. Soon he would be back for the third and last load. Lani knew that was when Mitch Johnson would make his move. That was when he would kill them.

But even with death looming closer, Lani no longer felt frightened. The whispered words of Nana Dahd’s war chant were helping Lani to remain calm in the face of whatever was to come. And the pot was helping her as well. Still undetected by either Quentin or Mitch, it lay nestled between her legs. Stroking the cool, hard clay seemed to offer as much comfort as Nana Dahd’s song. The presence of the pot seemed to take up where the people-hair basket had left off.

Across the darkened cave, Mitch Johnson was talking, his voice droning on and on, as much to himself as to Lani. When she finally started paying attention, he was talking about Quentin’s reaction to the drug. “Scopolamine’s interesting stuff, isn’t it? Sort of like a combination of drug and hypnosis. I guess those guys down in Colombia aren’t so stupid after all.”

“That’s what you used on us?” Lani asked.

“Andy claimed that scopolamine poisoning makes ’em hot as hell, red as a beet, mad as a hatter, and blind as a bat.”

In that throwaway remark Lani almost missed the crucial name—Andy. Her heart lurched inside her chest. All night long she had been forging spiritual links between this man and the evil Ohb. Now, though, for the first time, there was some outside confirmation that connections between Andrew Carlisle of old and this new evil Ohb did exist. Lani had to know for sure.

“Who’s Andy?” she asked, swallowing an entirely new lump of fear that rose dangerously in her throat.

“Did you say ‘Who’s Andy?’ ” Mitch Johnson asked in mock disbelief. “You mean here you are, smart enough to go to University High School, but you’re not smart enough to figure all this out for yourself?”

“Who’s Andy?” Lani repeated.

“A friend of mine,” Mitch Johnson told her. “It turns out he was a friend of your mother’s as well. If you’ve read your mother’s book, then you know a whole lot about him. His name was Carlisle. Andrew Philip Carlisle. Ever heard of him?”

Sitting there in the dark, Lani’s body was covered by another wave of gooseflesh. She felt sick to her stomach. It was true, then. She was shut up in the darkened cave with a man named Mitch Johnson, but she was there with Andrew Carlisle as well, with the vengeful spirit of the evil Ohb who had raped and tortured her mother.