Call Me Crazy (Janet Lomayestewa, Tracker) Read online

  PARRIS*AFTON*BONDS

  CALL*ME* CRAZY

  Janet Lomayestewa Tracker

  Book II

  Published by Parris Afton, Inc. at Kindle

  Copyright 2013 by Parris Afton, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover artwork by DigitalDonna.com

  Kindle Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away.

  For Diane Morasco

  Multi-talented Genius

  and

  Magic Carpet Genie

  With special thanks to Katherine Boyer, wonderful editor, wonderful friend!

  CHAPTER ONE

  Like most people of good sense, the Hopi Indians considered death and everything related to it as loathsome. So Janet Lomayestewa was hell bent that the return of Roy Lomayestewa’s head to its body that early frosty September morning would be a simple and quickly executed mortuary rite.

  Wiry Wes Keevama, Chief of Police of the Hopi Nation, spaded out the last shovel of dirt. Hotshot astrophysicist Jack Ripley, looking more like a Caribbean corsair with his black handkerchief knotted behind his head, lifted up the blanket-wrapped body that had been placed in a flexed position and facing east. The freezer-burnt head was horrifying enough. She didn’t know what to expect once the handmade quilt was removed from Roy’s torso. In the extreme heat of the high, arid desert, rapid desiccation occurred, almost a mummification process.

  All I have to do is line up the skull with the grizzle of cervical column. You can do this, Loma.

  Problem was the ulcerated flesh would have shrunken so that the skull and column might not match. Her brother’s body had been found first, four weeks earlier. It had been mangled in Peabody Energy’s conveyor that shuttled coal down from Black Mesa’s 6000-foot steep escarpment in Arizona; the head was discovered later, stored in a freezer. Now that Roy’s head was to be reunited with its buried body, an end would be put to his doomed, wandering spirit, allowing it to join the Kachinas.

  Her glance swiveled over her shoulder. Not out of squeamishness. She had seen a lot, both in Afghanistan and Kosovo and, later, along the Arizona/Mexico border, tracking with the Shadow Wolves, an all-Indian team that was part of Homeland Security’s ICE.

  No, she looked behind her only to assure the two children were otherwise occupied in the warmth of Jack’s rusty ’56 Ford pickup. His imaginative son Charley, whom Jack had arranged to homeschool this semester, was still reading Star Wars – The Empire Strikes Back from his homeschool Notepad to her daughter, an enthralled Molly.

  Both were twelve, but Charley’s laser-quick intelligence put him years ahead of twelve . . . and Molly’s painfully slow grasp of reality was permanently stowed away in the seven-year-old bracket.

  The incident responsible for Molly’s arrested mental development had sucked the life out of Janet’s every moment, every self-destructive breath . . . until incandescent, irascible Jack Ripley had come along a few months earlier and infused her with . . . with Life. Somehow, when he came near her the room temperature shot up to the sizzling point. Never, not even with Ram, the impetuous-but-devoted love of her youth, had she experienced that . . . that out-of-control feeling. So getting caught up with this bahana, this outsider, was as crazy as it came.

  Routine, regulated, regimented – that was the life she preferred.

  You’re lying to yourself, as usual, Loma. Why, then, the dance-the-edge-of-danger jobs?

  Spider Man would have said she had lost her way somewhere on the Hopi Path of Life – not just through witnessing death, but through dealing out death herself. She’d no longer felt Hopi, but she certainly didn’t feel white either.

  She swiveled her attention back to the burial procession. The time had come for the washing of her brother’s blood-matted hair. While Jack carefully removed Roy’s head from the black Tupperware-like evidence box, she screwed off the cap of the small plastic bottle into which she had poured the homemade yucca soap-and-water mixture.

  Jack stiffly outstretched hands, almost as big as spades, cradled her brother’s freezer-burned head, its face both puffy and shriveled. Her hands started to shake, and her breath was shallow. She could feel Jack’s steady, electric-green gaze almost holding her upright. She began to anoint the head’s night-black hair. Pink soapy water dribbled onto the sand, crystallizing into frost by the high desert’s cold morning temperature.

  Jack’s shot her a questioning glance. Off to her left, the wiry Wes was watching her with his ever-so-penetrating gaze, probably one of the reasons he was rated with highest marks among Native American law enforcement officers.

  She nodded at both men that she was all right.

  She tried to keep a sense of detachment about the burial rite, but how could any human not find the sight both bizarre and ghastly? A sour/sweet smell stung her nostrils. She fought back a gagging reflex. Below his sweeping mustache, Jack’s mouth twitched and his Adam’s apple bobbed.

  With more will power than she had thought she would have required, she resumed the Hopi ritual – tucking the piece of piki bread in the puckered mouth and draping Roy’s favorite turquoise necklace around the grizzled stub of spinal cord. Normally, a paternal family member was given the task of the burial rituals, but she and Roy had no paternal family member still living. The Hopi were a matrilineal people, so she, a descendent from the maternal side, assumed the duty of carrying out the respectful rites.

  She told herself, promised herself, she would cry later, after the completion of the burial rituals. She might not have always kept her promises to others, but she had always kept her promises to herself. Up to now, at least.

  “At last,” she whispered hoarsely to Roy’s corpse, “may your spirit find its home and release from Koyaanisqatsi, World out of Balance.”

  In that moment of brief silence, the early light of dawn bathed the mourners in an other-worldly pink. Then Jack and Wes began to lower the blanket-wrapped body back into its resting place once more.

  After the two men had shoveled the dirt and sand back into place again, Molly caught her by surprise. Her daughter had sprung from the pickup and was dashing toward the earth-mounded plot. Lanky Charley, attempting to corral Molly, arrived scant seconds behind her. Startling the adults, Molly fluttered atop Roy’s grave like an Indian Tinker Bell. Her little hand dipped into the yucca basket she had woven for Janet and sprinkled her treasured collection of rubbled rocks like magical gold dust over the loose soil.

  Janet stood transfixed. At first appalled, she realized in the next moment that only a child could see beauty and wonder and joy in all of Life’s experiences. Not just any child. Special children not weighted by crusted time.

  Above Molly’s rosy cheeks, her dark eyes danced, and the chilling breeze tossed about her long jet-black hair. Her fleece-lined blue-jean jacket, a birthday gift from Janet’s old friends Martin and Roberta, flared and flounced like a tutu. Her last pirouette complete, she breathlessly asked, “Mommy, can we have a tea party to celebrate?”

  She gulped. “Yes, we can celebrate with a tea party.”

  Celebrate a life that most wouldn’t consider an important one. Roy had been Janet’s only sibling, a loving big brother, despite their occasional spats. He was an auto mechanic by profession and single by choice. She had often thought of him as The Michelin Man – his generous heart and big body wrapped by hard rubber.

  She swallowed back stinging tears that threatened to flow from out of nowhere. Later! All the while grief exploded up from her heart like land-mine shrapnel. When her body wanted to double over with wracking paroxysms, to tumble in a fetal coi
l into comforting Mother Earth, her slight, five-foot frame straightened, stiffened, separated.

  For her, emotional pain was always greater than physical pain. Emotional pain was less sustainable, less endurable, less expressible. Her grief was not pure. It was tainted by regrets and doubts and guilt. These she could handle. Her physical durability protected her emotional weaknesses. If no one else, she could, at least, rely on herself. If the day ever came when her high energy might be decimated, not merely diminished as her resilience had been with pregnancy . . . well, she supposed that was her greatest fear, incapacity.

  Wes, his features always uncompromising, had offered comfort before, when she was carrying Molly, Ram’s child, – and would still offer comfort, if Janet would allow him.

  Yet it was Jack she wanted. She wanted to turn to him, to be cradled in his wrap-around arms until her knifing grief subsided. Still, she questioned whether this new love of hers, this tall, edgy and complex outsider, could ever bridge the chasm of suspicion that divided not only male and female but also white and Indian cultures.

  Jack with the laughing eyes and hard heart and too sharp mind. Was he hanging around the Rez like a lover hoping to lay claim to her – or like a vulture hoping to lay claim to the legendary missing corner piece?

  Even now this ruggedly drop-jaw-handsome man surprised her by thrusting his arms heavenward and giving an inappropriate whoop of ebullience. “Yeeehawww!”

  Aghast, she stared at the mad man. He ignored her admonishing frown and plowed headfirst to wallow in the grave’s loose soil. Molly burst into tinkling laughter. Beneath his crew cut, Wes’s swarthy skin reddened in affronted anger. Charley’s sloping honey-colored brows knitted with child-like bewilderment.

  Thick butterscotch mustache flecked with dirt, Jack struggled upright to his knees. Triumphantly he held aloft a triangle-shaped rock. No mere rock, but one that prismed the morning’s sun’s cold, sharp light.

  She gaped. He was holding what had to be the missing, quartz crystal corner piece!

  Because of her lineal connection with the Hopi’s legendary Fire Clan stone tablet and its incalculably precious corner piece, she and her people had become targets. There were those who viewed the Hopi as a backward, superstitious people, scraping for survival in the desert of the Southwest. Yet others held the opinion the Hopi were mystics who had treasured up a millennium worth of esoteric knowledge just waiting to be plundered.

  She, Jack, and Wes stared across the grave at one another, their thoughts all centered on their collective elation – and, also, fear. Somewhere, a control-hungry interest of global proportions had been wanting to plunder this esoteric knowledge by gaining possession of the Holy Stone’s corner piece – and was leaving a trail of corpses in its efforts.

  Her protective glance swept over Molly and Charley and returned to Jack and Wes. “The mercenary with the toothpick,” she breathed. The skeleton at the feast. “This puts us back in his gun site.”

  Why had she not been on top of this – following up on clues to the elusive gunman responsible for the assassination of Wes’s three Rangers last month? Before, she had always been able to sense when something was amiss. Her palms would itch, the hair at her nape would prickle, her ears would practically buzz. But that was before . . . before Jack.

  “Maybe he’s given up,” he offered.

  Wes’s eyes milked over. “His kind don’t.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Hopi Fire Clan’s stone tablet prophesized koyaanisqatsi, “world out of balance.” Supposedly, something about the stone tablet’s corner piece might stave off some nebulous future time of world purification like earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, droughts, and hurricanes – or man-made ones, possibly even more horrific.

  In contrast to this gloomy viewpoint, Jack felt the Holy Stone could provide an alternant energy source for a grand-scale power grid. The fabled Hopi stone tablet’s corner piece of quartz crystal was the same element making up the silicone chips that virtually powered the world.

  Jack’s astrophysics work at both IBM’s laboratory in Zurich and Los Alamos Labs in New Mexico had provided him with a broad array of specialized fields, one being electro-magnetic geography. He knew electric power was everywhere present in unlimited quantities and could drive the world’s machinery without the need of coal, oil, gas, or any other of the common fuels. Science just had to find a way to access that electric power.

  His left-brain scientist’s mind nagged him that the earth’s magnetic field strength was declining, had lost up to half its intensity in the last 4,000 years. Because a forerunner of magnetic polar reversals was field strength, another cyclical shift was long overdue – what the Hopi might term as the close of the Fourth World.

  So the cliché, “time is of the essence” meant more than the general population might realize.

  On the return trip to Janet’s ancestral home in Hotevilla, the largest populated of the twelve Hopi villages, his usually analytical mind was hopelessly bemused by the enormity of his find. “Who would have thought out of this mangy village of Hotevilla,” he mused aloud, “would come the solution that not only could heal the world’s energy crisis but could also vanquish the disease that took my wife’s life?!”

  He was a published expert and reluctant celebrity in the field of electromagnetic bio-scalar dynamics. Acupuncture, gi gong, massage, reflexology, reiki – all of these energy therapies he had researched in hopes of finding a cure for Linda’s disease. He was convinced that changing the body’s energy was at the base of that cure.

  The trouble was he might be an expert in energy but he was not an expert with women – although his ineptitude, bordering on carelessness, didn’t send them fleeing but seemed, conversely, to attract them. His ‘Prepare to be boarded’ attitude left them wide-eyed yet wanting more.

  Nevertheless, in the ensuing silence within the pickup, he knew he had said something wrong. Something terribly wrong. Even the two children, wedged between him and Janet, seemed to sense a tension.

  Mangy. That must have been it.

  He took his eyes off the road to slide a sideways glance at Janet. “Hotevilla’s like Nazareth in a way,” he amended with what he hoped was a winsome smile. “You know, where they said, ‘Nothing good ever comes out of Nazareth.’ Like your friend Martin said, ‘Hopi Land, Holy Land.’”

  A dark arrow-shaped brow raised, the only movement in Janet’s profile. The side with the scar. She considered her face boxy. For him, it was as classically powerful as Nefertiti’s . . . yet, with her night-black hair gently swaying from the back of her Dallas Cowboy cap like a little girl’s ponytail, her profile deceptively appeared as delicate as a child’s.

  Hell, she was childish lately. And her damned silent Indian detachment was jacking with him. What had happened to the vibrantly alive woman who at first sight had awakened him from his way-too-long mourning? He had never been bored when around her, as he had been with dating after Linda’s death. Those women had wanted the three C’s – chemistry, communication and commitment.

  But with this wild child, she wanted only her freedom, her independence. For better or worse, he seemed to be a walking erection these days. They had known each other less than two months and, hampered by their offspring, had managed to have salacious, panting, bang-you-on-the stairs-or-wherever sex, what, maybe three, four, times? Maybe, that’s why sex with her was still high-voltage.

  Well, he now had the quartz piece and was ready to hoist the Jolly Roger whenever, but he tried again, in a tone even more conciliatory. “Imagine what an electromagnetic energy field the size of Four Corners could do to cure the ills of the world!” Why was it so damned important that she be pleased. Hell, everyone wanted to be pleased, and that was most certainly not going to be his mission in life.

  “Maybe, the quartz corner piece could even bring your wife back to life, sort of like a modern Gethsemane resurrection.”

  It took him a second to make the connection. Her mind didn’t march the shortest p
aths between two dots but raced to join all dots outside the box in a breathless fashion. “So that’s what flat-lined you?” he demanded. “Do you realize that in the weeks since your former lover’s death, sweetheart, you’ve been as contentious as a -- “

  “Don’t turn this on me, Jack Ripley. And let’s leave lovers out of this.”

  Her voice was low, soft even, but the fire smoldering beneath it was ready to burst into a conflagration. He started to make a below-the-belt retort about her numerous affairs. She had acknowledged them with a spiky defiance, as if he were just one more among many and must have known that bothered his ego.

  He glimpsed the kids’ wide eyes and clamped his mouth shut. And kept his hands on the wheel, when they wanted nothing more than to grab her upper arms and jerk her over his lap. A good spanking . . . .

  What had made him even indulge the idea of a relationship with yet another woman? He had been a handful for his wife. How Linda had coped with her disease, much less with him, amazed him.

  In fact, she hadn’t. Hadn’t coped well with her disease, Acute Erythroblastic Leukemia, or she’d be alive now. And hadn’t coped well with him. His prickly personality often triggered a flicker of hurt in her eyes, and, hating himself, he’d storm from their house. For him, a mild-mannered personality would be a trait as rare as her form of untreatable cancer.

  “And just as deadly,” she had often and lovingly reassured him. “How deadly tiresome.”

  Well, no need for him and Charley to linger any longer. He had found the missing corner piece to the legendary Hopi Stone Tablet! He was leaving with far more than for that which he had come seeking. There were other energy grids. He could even rebuild his stolen prototype. Now was the time to hoist the sails. However, saying ‘adios’ might take a little finesse. Certainly more effort than he had given the other affairs that had drifted in and out with the tide following Linda’s death.