Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [89]
I moved my hands away from my body. Slowly, sending out gentle waves.
The Indian nodded as if he understood my gesture. “Tell the woman to get your bags and bring them out,” he said. His voice was more twangy than I’d expected, New Orleans in there somewhere. Exaggerated maybe by his nose—looked like he’d broken it one time and they hadn’t done a great job in the ER.
“Do it,” I told Gem, not taking my eyes off the Indian.
He said something to the dog in a language I didn’t understand. It jumped back onto the front seat as easy as a beagle climbing a curb. When Gem came back out with our bags, the dog was right behind her.
“Put them over there,” the Indian told her, gesturing with his free hand toward a clearing to his right.
Gem did it. The pit bull trotted alongside her like they were going to the park to play Frisbee.
“Go back with him,” the Indian told her, moving so he was between us and the bags. Then he moved a few steps closer, held my eyes: “There was only supposed to be one person.”
“It was a one-way communication,” I told him. “There wasn’t any way for me to say I was bringing my—”
“Who are you?” he asked, as if it was a test.
“Burke.”
“Why are you here?”
“To see Lune.”
“Can you prove who you are?”
“I don’t know. It depends on what would be proof to you.”
The Indian nodded as if that made perfect sense. “We are in the Sandia Mountains,” he said. “About a mile and a half up. Sound carries in the thin air. But nobody pays attention. Another mile or so straight up that road, it’s snowing. I have to be satisfied with who you are or we all drive up there and I come back alone, understand?”
“Yeah, I understand. What I don’t understand is what you want me to do about it. He wouldn’t recognize my face. I was—”
“Shot, it looks like,” he interrupted.
“Right. You want to take my fingerprints? Would that do it?”
“No. I have to ask you a question.”
But he didn’t ask one. Just stood there, as if waiting for the question to come to him. When I heard the cell phone trill in his breast pocket, I realized that maybe it would.
“We’re here,” he answered.
He listened for a second, then said: “He is not alone.”
More silence, then: “No.”
He listened for another minute, closed the phone, and slipped it back into his pocket.
“What was the name of your problem?” he asked me.
The name of my problem? If I knew that, I wouldn’t need to … And then I snapped on it. He didn’t mean now, he meant then. Back when Lune and I were … “Hunsaker,” I told him. “Eugene Hunsaker.”
The Indian nodded his head slightly. And put the pistol back inside his coat. “I still have to go through your bags,” he said. “I can’t watch you and do that at the same time. But Indeh will. Just stay in one spot, and he won’t bother you.”
The pit moved a few steps toward us, but he stayed as relaxed as he’d been all along, the hair on the back of his neck nice and flat.
“Help yourself,” I said.
The Indian did a thorough job. Took out every single item and laid it on the ground, then checked the bags for seams and compartments before he went through the contents.
“Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll let you repack your own stuff—I wouldn’t want to mess it up.”
When Gem and I were done, we all piled back in the Land Rover. The Indian turned it around and headed down the mountain.
The Land Rover’s compass told me we were heading north, and the highway signs said we were on I-25. The Sandia Mountains remained a looming presence on our right, but to the left was a vast open space, mostly flat except for some scattered mesas … and another mountain range off in the far distance. The Indian saw me looking in that direction. “The San Mateos,” he said.
As the Land Rover rolled past a landscape of sand and low scrub growth, we were buffeted by gusts of wind that vanished as suddenly as they appeared