Walk a Black Wind (21 page)

Authors: Michael Collins

BOOK: Walk a Black Wind

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I faced Katje Crawford. “What was your father to do back then? His own daughter had shot him, but could he send her to prison, ruin her life and her children's lives? So he never told. He kept silent, and felt guilty all these years. That was why he didn't reveal that he knew Ralph Blackwind was alive, and that was why he finally told the truth to Francesca. He was near death, she was aware of her real father at last from Joel Pender's mistake, so he told her, and that was why you had her killed.”

Katje Crawford's eyes had the fear in them, and the hate, too, and a kind of strangely detached angerâat a world that wouldn't behave as she insisted it should? How dare the world not do what she wanted? Then and now. It was the world's fault, Ralph Blackwind's fault for not understanding back then that she had had to correct a mistake, the fault of Francesca for being the intransigent child she had been.

“You had to come back,” she said to Andera. “Ruin my life. So insane you thought I'd actually go with you that night, never even noticed that I took your pistol back to the house. Yes, I shot my father. I hoped I'd killed him! You would have gone to the electric chair then! He didn't die, but he didn't tell, either. It was fine. Only the old fool had to tell Francesca three months ago! He wanted her to know the truth about her real father before he died. He told her. And I knew you were really alive. I'd seen you.”

She glared at Andera, it was his fault for being alive.

“I didn't recognize you at all,” she said. “But you have a habit. A strange, unique habitâyou always smell a drink before you drink it. When I saw you do that with Tony Sasser that night at his house, I knew. I couldn't believe it, but I knew it was you.”

Andera said, “At Pine River we smell the water we drink. Alkali; poisoned water holes. I never lost the habit.”

“Once I saw that,” Katje Crawford said, “I saw the contact lenses, the dyed hair, the lifts in your shoes, the hint of the face I knew under the changes. You were alive, and then my father told Francesca the truth. To clear his conscience! Was I going to let her tell you, let you come for me? A professional killer?”

John Andera moved. I had relaxed too much. He lunged, and he had my gun. Without a word, he lunged, got hold of my gun, and for an instant we wrestled. The gun fell from my hand, hit the floor with a loud clatter. Silent, he jumped toward where it had fallen.

We both saw the little automatic come out of Katje Crawford's handbag. She held it, the .22-caliber mate of the the one Felicia had aimed at me. The pistol that had killed Carl Gans. Both Andera and I stood motionless for a moment. Then Andera forgot my pistol, began to walk straight toward her, his hands curled as if for her throat.

She shot him four times. All four shots hit him in the chest and stomach. He walked on. She shot a fifth time. He stumbled to one knee, sank forward on his face not three feet from her with his hands still reaching toward her.

That fifth shot was all that saved my fife. She shot me in the stomach. I doubled over, but the little bullet didn't stop me. I was on my knees reaching toward my gun on the floor. She tried to shoot again, but the gun was empty. Andera's pistol was ten feet from her. She couldn't get it before I reached my gun. She turned and ran out of the lodge. I got my pistol, and fired one shot before she vanished. It went somewhere in the ceiling.

Outside, her car started, faded away.

I crawled to John Andera. He had rolled onto his back. He was still breathing. His eyes were open up toward the ceiling, but not seeing the ceiling. Seeing, maybe, the sky of Arizona.

“Andera?” I said. “Blackwind?”

“Trapped â¦” his whisper said. “â¦ the land â¦”

That was all he said. I crawled to the telephone, called the police. When I crawled back to him, He Who Walked A Black Wind was dead.

28.

I was in the hospital for two weeks. The little bullet had torn me up inside, and they weren't sure I would make it. I just lay there and breathed. I cared about nothing except staying aliveâjust like Katje Crawford.

Lieutenant Oster wasn't happy with me, neither was Gazzo down in New York. But the police must work on facts and evidence, and this time there had been no other way to smoke out the truth except my way. They could close the books now in both citiesâthere was no point to charging Harmon Dunstan or George Tabor, the dead Mark Leland's partner, for their silence and evasion.

My girl, Marty, came up to see me. She had her director with her, so we could only be polite. Mayor Martin Crawford visited me on the sixth day. I was feeling better, I knew I would live a while. Crawford told me that they hadn't found Katje yet. He seemed older, sadder.

“They traced her to Los Angeles,” he said. “Poor Katje, she must have been crazy with fear. I don't know what I'm going to tell the children, the younger ones.”

“Try the truth,” I said. “What happens to Black Mountain Lake now? Any second thoughts?”

“Of course not. Someone will take over for Abram Zaremba.”

“Business as usual, as soon as you know who to cosy up to?”

“What happened had no relation to the project, Fortune,” he said. “I had no part in what happened.”

“You could have told Francesca the truth all these years, you could have been a father. But you kept quiet, got your share.”

“It was all Katje's ideas and actions.”

“But you wanted her, so you share the guilt. At least you could be a real mayor, work for the people, not for the Sassers and Zarembas. That had its part in killing Francesca, too. The legal but immoral world you live with. Greed and privilege.”

“I do nothing wrong, Fortune. A man exists in his world. I work with things as they are, get all I can. I live today, win if I can, and don't apologize for the way things are.”

He wouldn't change, no. Self-interest was the base. He'd get a new wife someday, one just like Katje, but without, hopefully, a mistake in her past that drove her to hate, fraud, fear and murder. He'd forget Francesca because it was too hard, too unnerving, to go on remembering. Eventually, he would come to think of her as a sad, foolish girl with wild ideas that got her killedâher fault, not the world's.

Near the end of my two weeks in hospital, Lieutenant Oster brought the word that Katje Crawford had been found in Panama City. She had tried to shoot the Panamanian policemen, still fighting for her life and her needs. They shot her to pieces. They don't fool with armed fugitives down there.

It all seemed so purposelessâKatje Crawford's battles for her privileges; Zaremba and Sasser's scheming for power and money; Martin Crawford's deals for his big house and his comfort. No purpose beyond the moment. All so brief and transient in a life that was itself so transient you had to give it shape with some purpose or there was only a mad race going nowhere.

On my last day, as I dressed, Felicia Crawford and Paul Two Bears came to visit. The police had told them all of it. Felicia's face was dry and quiet. Almost as quiet as the face of Francesca on the morgue slab where it had all started for me. It gave my healing stomach a turn, seeing Felicia's face so much like that of her dead sister.

“So?” I said. “Can you forget it all?”

“I don't know,” she said. “We're going back to Pine River. I like it thereâthe space, the land; hard as it is. I'm half Indian, after all. Work with the tribe, the land.”

“A purpose?” I said.

Paul Two Bears said, “For the old man, before he dies.”

“A change is coming,” Felicia said. “For the Indians, maybe for the country. Maybe they'll listen to the Indians, to us. The old man thinks the time is near.”

“I envy you,” I said.

“A home,” she said. “A real home. Not a father, maybe, but a grandfather, an uncle, cousins, a place. For me and for Francesca. I'll be happy for both of us. I know who we are, what we are. For both of us, Mr. Fortune.”

“She'd be glad,” I said.

She would beâFrancesca Blackwind. Aware, somehow, all her short life that she belonged somewhere.

After they had gone, before I went out and back to my own narrow world, I sat and pictured again Francesca's dead face in the morgue. She would be happy to know that her sister had gone home, had found the place that she, Francesca, had known was there and had wanted.

Out of it all, one had gone home, had found the lost home they had carried inside them. It made me feel almost good.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This edition published in 2012 by
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