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  “Money,” Vincent said. “Name it. I’ll pay whatever you ask.”

  “He thinks that you want his money,” Nathan said to me.

  “Name it. Then just drop me anywhere.”

  “After you get us the money?”

  “Yes, yes. After.”

  “You killed your own father, you made it look like suicide.”

  “No,” Vincent said. “No, now listen, no.”

  “And the other suicides, of those gamblers with big losses, were they all suicides or did you kill them, too?”

  “You have no proof!” Vincent shouted.

  Nathan stood on the brake pedal, the Cherokee wobbling across both lanes of I-10 as he swirled onto the shoulder and then caught the Casa Grande off-ramp. He drove past darkened houses until he found a large, empty desert lot and moved the Cherokee out into the middle of the lot. Nathan stopped the car, unfastened his seat belt, motioned for me to do the same as he opened his door and took out a clasp knife, unfolding the large blade before he opened the back door to reach in with the knife and cut the plastic quick-tie around Vincent’s ankles.

  “Out,” Nathan said. Uncertain what was happening, Vincent hesitated, but Nathan did nothing, just waited until Vincent slid awkwardly across the seat and dropped his legs outside, shoulder against the door frame to balance himself as he stood on the hardpan desert floor. Nathan cut the quick-tie around Vincent’s wrists, waited patiently as Vincent rubbed his wrists, slapping them to get more circulation, all this time Nathan standing with the open clasp knife, waiting.

  Off to the south, lightning flickered behind the mountain ranges as the monsoon moved steadily away from Tucson, but occasional fingers of the winds swept across the desert and things rustled and moved in the dark and birds flew everywhere, disturbed by the wind, I heard cactus wrens scolding off in the brush and a large bird swooped down and up without a sound. With the Cherokee headlights out, my eyes adjusted to the dark, swarms of stars appearing as the monsoon pushed all remaining clouds away.

  “Give me your Beretta,” Nathan said to me.

  “My, give you what?”

  “Your Beretta.” I slowly handed it to him. He tossed it in the air, grasping the barrel as the gun settled into his hand, the checkered rubberized grip facing toward Vincent and the muzzle at Nathan’s stomach. Nathan lifted the front of his sweatshirt, pulled at the Glock to free it up, and then extended the Beretta to Vincent. “Okay,” Nathan said. “You’ve been looking for an edge, here it is.”

  “Nathan!” I said. The large bird swooped again, a great horned owl, flying silently despite its size, we’d probably disturbed its stalking prey and the owl buzzed us angrily one more time before flying off.

  “Just take her gun. See if you can shoot before I can.” Vincent stopped rubbing his wrists, flexed his fingers. Nathan moved closer, extending my gun. “Isn’t this how they do it in the movies?”

  “You’ll kill me,” Vincent said.

  “We’ve all got to die. Just a matter of when.”

  He pushed the Beretta right up against Vincent’s right hand and Vincent hesitated and then stepped back, arms to his side, shaking his head.

  “No,” he said. “No.”

  “Then you can go,” Nathan said shortly.

  “Go?”

  “Nathan?” I said. “Why?”

  “Why?” Vincent said.

  “You’re right,” Nathan said. “We’ve got no proof.”

  “No proof. Yes, that’s right.”

  “But just to answer the question, just for me, just to satisfy me, just to give me some closure about my friends who died, I’d like to hear you say that you were part of it.”

  “No, no,” Vincent said. Confidence returning, he smiled, his capped teeth shining in the starlight.

  “We’re intelligent people,” Nathan said. “We’re forgiving people. I just want to know, that’s all.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Just one thing,” I said. “Did you kill your father?”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “A long time,” I said, taking my Beretta from Nathan, sticking it under my belt in the small of my back. “We could never prove anything, Nathan is right, there’s no proof. I’d just like to know.”

  “He didn’t want me to be in the movies,” Vincent said at last, nodding to himself. “Leon, he agreed, he hated it, anyway.”

  “And what did your father ask of you?”

  “We had twenty-nine sheep,” Vincent said. “He wanted to buy more, he wanted me and Leon to raise the sheep.”

  “And that’s why you killed him?”

  “It was almost an accident.”

  “Almost?” Nathan said.

  “He didn’t want me to have that pistol. Henry Fonda gave the pistol to my father, but John Ford, the director, he said I was good-looking and well built, Ford got a leather holster and gun belt and hung it on me, stuck the pistol in the belt, and offered me a part in two more movies he was going to make. That night, my father tried to take the pistol from me.”

  “And the accident?”

  “I wouldn’t let him.”

  We stood there, the three of us, nobody saying a word for nearly five minutes, the monsoon breezes tapering off and the night creatures settling down. One last flare of lightning crinkled far off to the southwest.

  “Well,” Vincent said. “I’ll be going.”

  “What about the law?” Nathan asked.

  “There’s no proof.”

  “What about tribal law?” Nathan said.

  “Tribal…what are you saying?”

  “You’re so far beyond any laws,” Nathan said, “that we’ll make our own law. This is what’s going to happen. When we drive up to Monument Valley, there are people waiting for us. They’re bringing a coyote skin. We’ll leave you with them.”

  Vincent backpedaled trying to run and Nathan strode to him in a blur, sacking Vincent over his shoulder, Vincent struggling as Nathan bulled toward the Cherokee and dumped Vincent into the backseat, Nathan taking a large roll of duct tape from under the seat and winding it around and around Vincent’s ankles and legs and arms until Vincent lay cocooned in tape, screaming for Nathan to let him go until Nathan wound a last ribbon of tape over Vincent’s mouth and nobody said another word for the next six hours as we pushed steadily through Flagstaff and Tuba City and past Black Mesa then north at Kayenta and finally a dirt track off into Monument Valley where seven people huddled around a small breakfast fire, waiting for us, waiting for the skinwalker to finally come home for the last time.

  epilogue

  Weeks later, on our way again to the Navajo reservation, but this time for pleasure, we stopped in Winslow.

  “You lived here once?” Nathan said. Looking down the shotgun-straight avenue, old buildings, post office, Elks lodge. A forgotten small city.

  “Over there.” I pointed at a seedy building, once a motel, now probably cheap rooms for rent. “Came over here from the mesas, spent two nights with Jonathan, our honeymoon.” Nathan stared at a silver and black Harley laid against the wall. “Afterward we ran away, but not enough money to drive any farther than Winslow. I worked three days in the grocery store, earned enough so on the third day we gassed the pickup, I hustled a box of stolen groceries out the back door. We went off to Pine Ridge from here.

  In Monument Valley, we followed the hand-drawn map to Antoinette Claw’s hogan. She told us, in her own way, the last of the skinwalker stories.

  “One of my aunts told me this story,” she said. “A yenaldlooshi story. My aunt, she was home with her husband, their children all gone to other lives and other hogans. So one night, my aunt and her husband are singing songs, getting ready to lie down, and this yenaldlooshi comes into their hogan and demands they give him all their valuables, or that’s what my aunt said, I think she was terrified, who knows what was said in there. The husband, he turned up the kerosene lantern and the yenaldlooshi runs out of the hogan and the husband says, that’s
the last yenaldlooshi I ever want to see in this valley, I’m going to kill him. So the husband, he’s got this really old shotgun, it’s more like some hunting musket, just a single shot, he loads and primes it all up and he goes outside, meaning to track the yenaldlooshi, but it’s just standing there, like it’s confused and trying to peel off its coyote skin, but the husband ain’t taking no chances, he fires the musket and blows a hole in the yenaldlooshi’s chest. They know the yenaldlooshi is dead, so they drive over to the tribal police station, bring a policeman back. The yenaldlooshi tried, before he breathed his last, he tried to get out of the coyote skin, but it was tied all around his body, tied behind his back and onto his leg and hands and head, he couldn’t get out of it. Later, when they took his body down to Window Rock, they got the coyote skin off and it was somebody really familiar, they couldn’t place him right away until somebody said, Hey, that’s Franklin Begay’s son, isn’t it? And another policeman, or maybe the doctor cutting him open he says, Yeah. He used to be a movie actor. I guess he was trying out for his last part.”

  And that’s the true end of this story.

  About the Author

  DAVID COLE is the author of five previous books featuring Laura Winslow: Butterfly Lost, The Killing Maze, Stalking Moon, Scorpion Rain, and Dragonfly Bones. In 1994 he co-founded NativeWeb (www.nativeweb.org), an Internet corporation for Native Americans and indigenous peoples of the world. A longtime political activist, he lives in Syracuse, New York, and Tucson, Arizona.

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  PRAISE FOR SHADOW PLAY

  AND THE MYSTERIES OF

  DAVID COLE

  “SHADOW PLAY is fast-paced and entertaining, with its unique blend of ages-old Navajo spirituality, high-tech savvy, and two complicated sleuths chasing their own demons. The story lifts off like a rocket over the Arizona desert and never throttles back.”

  Margaret Coel

  “Laura Winslow…is one of the most complex and fully realized protagonists around. [W]henever Cole…throws her into the dangerous and violent outside world of his fiction, I resign myself to staying up late and finishing the book in one gulp.”

  Donna Andrews

  “A can’t-put-it-down thriller.”

  Mystery Scene on Dragonfly Bones

  “Chock full of memorable characters, convincing dialogue, and enough dead bodies to keep even the most jaded reader happy…carefully crafted.”

  Lansing State Journal on Butterfly Lost

  “Her technological savvy, Hopi heritage and the grim lessons gained from her dark and tragic personal history combine to make Laura Winslow a unique and gutsy sleuth. She’s at her best in this compelling and readable novel.”

  Mary Jane Maffini

  Other books by

  David Cole

  DRAGONFLY BONES

  SCORPION RAIN

  STALKING MOON

  THE KILLING MAZE

  BUTTERFLY LOST

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SHADOW PLAY. Copyright © 2004 by David Cole. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  ePub edition April 2008 ISBN 9780061751622

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