remnants were a line of hot-iron-red glow along the western hills. Overhead the sky shaded from indigo to star-shot black. Some clouds, their bottoms showing just a faint yellowish glow of artifact light, were sweeping in from the east, piling up darkly as if to show bad intentions.
“Don’t do this to me,” she told the car. “I don’t want to hike up to the highway in freezing rain.”
The country was getting seriously hilly, preparatory to becoming the Wichitas. Highway 62, which ran from Lawton straight as a leveling laser west and formed the southern boundary of a spur of the military reservation that stuck out under the wildlife refuge, still lay, as closely as she could reckon, three miles north. And it was cold. Despite the heater she could feel the chill beating off the car windows like a negative furnace.
For the dozenth time she hauled out her phone. Still no bars. Her GPS was frozen.
Ahead to her considerable relief she saw artificial lights—a red-and-yellow oasis in a sea of dark. They weren’t bright lights, but then again this definitely wasn’t the big city. It wasn’t even the town of Cache, whose glow was faintly visible a few miles north, with its booming population of twenty-four hundred.
The flickering red neon sign read Bad Medicine Bar & Grill.
Below the battered sign stood a rectangular shack with a slanted tin roof, fronted by a wooden porch under a swaybacked roof of planks. The yellow light came through frosted front windows. The joint looked as if it had been built during the boom of interstate construction after World War II, possibly as an ersatz Indian trading post to attract the tourists. That struck Annja as optimism insane even by the standards of fifties-boom thinking.
As her rental lumped and bucked closer she saw there were no actual cars in the parking lot. There was a pickup truck and a minivan, not too unexpected in this part of the world, and another pickup hunched in the shadows out back. Dominating the dirt-and-gravel lot were at least a score of motorcycles shining in the light of the sign. The long low-slung beasts had heavily modified frames with burly V-twin engines. With pride of place in the middle of the pack sat the least visibly modified bike of the lot: a big Indian motorcycle with the trademark metal fairings over the tires. It looked to Annja’s none-too-expert eye like an original, not one of the never-too-successful attempts to revive the design, or at least the brand.
She went inside. She felt little trepidation. While a single woman had to tread warily in the borderlands, in the U.S. as well as everywhere in the world, she didn’t feel much concern. She had no problem with outlaw bikers, which in her experience had meant they had no trouble with her. She tended to take people on their own terms, and that seemed to work.
Of course, part of her intrinsic self-confidence sprang from the proven fact that if you did have a problem with Annja Creed, then you had a very bad problem, indeed.
The first things to hit her were heat and the slam of heavy-metal music blasting from a jukebox. Annja pushed on inside and let the door swing closed behind her.
After the darkness of the Plains night the bar’s dimly lit interior was still pretty dim. She paused just inside the door a moment to get her bearings. As the place resolved out of gloom she noticed it followed through with the outside’s deliberately rustic look, with a wood ceiling and exposed rafters bolstered in placed by square columns so rough-cut they looked as if you’d get splinters if you brushed up on one. It had the usual split-backed vinyl barroom chairs, tables to match the architecture, a bar with a long fly-specked mirror behind it. Bare bulbs cast a faint yellowish glow from lamps hung from the ceiling. Most of the illumination seemed to emanate from the jukebox beside her, which pulsated with polychromatic lights. Glancing down she saw the floor was actual wood planks. With sawdust on it, no less, like the Old West saloon the joint was obviously trying hard to emulate.
Her mental tracking system had already located the bar’s occupants. A few bellied up to the bar on foot or rickety-looking wood stools; the rest clustered around tables, or kibitzed while a short, wide man with a black bandanna tied around his head lined up a shot on the pool table in the far corner. Everyone in view but the bartender was dressed in the standard dark-hued biker drag; she could tell that much at a flash impression. She realized the truck and van outside were probably support vehicles for the club. Any joking and talking had stopped when she entered.
Time to break the ice, she thought.
“That’s a nice Indian out front,” she said.
Then she stopped dead.
There were nothing but Indians inside the bar.
And they looked anything but nice.
4
Everyone was staring at Annja, with nothing resembling a smile or eye twinkle in sight. She was quite aware she may have just said the wrong thing.
It was the classic situation where any attempt at explanation could only make things worse.
“Right, then,” she said. “Sorry to intrude. My car broke down. My cell phone isn’t getting a signal.”
She held the offending object up by her face and waved it. “I’ll just borrow the phone, make a quick call and get out of your…way.”
She was deliberately playing typical airhead tourist, in hopes they’d think her an idiot too innocuous to be worth bothering with. Not a great plan. But no really great options jumped up to present themselves, either.
She stepped up to the bar, noting that the two burly men next to her had colors on the backs of their old-school bad-biker denim jackets that showed an Indian warrior bestriding an Indian motorcycle—it looked suspiciously like the bike parked out front—shooting a bow. The legend on the back of the nearer biker read Iron Horse People MC, Comanche Nation. The other was similar, but substituted Kiowa for Comanche.
The bartender was a white guy, skinny as an alley cat, with craggy features and wild white hair. He looked white, anyway. Annja knew of numerous people who’d been born into full membership of their respective tribes who looked no more native. His blue eyes were piercing and unwelcoming when they turned on Annja. He didn’t ask her pleasure.
“May I borrow the phone, please?” she asked politely.
He jerked his head. “Pay phone,” he said. “Booth in the back.”
She raised a surprised eyebrow. In this cell-phone era pay phones were becoming an endangered species.
“It’s a dead zone,” said the biker who stood farther away from Annja to her right. He was a big bearlike guy with his black hair hanging free to his shoulders in twin braids.
“And we like it that way,” said the man next to her.
With a shock Annja noticed, more than a beat late, one of the very sort of details she was normally adept at picking up on quickly—he wore a semiautomatic pistol holstered on his left hip. A SIG-Sauer, she thought. She realized just about everyone in the bar was packing.
She was pretty sure it was a violation of Oklahoma law to carry a firearm into an establishment that served alcohol. She decided not to bring it up.
Annja turned in the direction indicated by the bartender and headed for a niche sunk in a plank wall beside a faded and torn poster for a bullfight, in Madrid in September 1963.
Suddenly she found herself blocked by a figure a good three inches
