Coyote (8 page)

Outside, the electrical storm was winding itself up into a towering rage.

So my first official case was going to send me into the middle of a war zone to chase down a diary that may not even exist — and with no real prep time. I studied my mockingly empty in-tray. You rotten little plastic bastard — you're going to get me killed!

But another week without income and I'd have to hock the damned thing.

‘You can't do it, Kannon.' Honeycutt had waited until Seymour left before exploding.

‘Leave it alone, Honeycutt.' I spoke as quietly as I could manage. If I really started to open up, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to force myself through the portal. ‘I have to go.'

Lightning lit the room, casting Honeycutt's now stern features into stark relief.

There was only one time portal in the whole wide world and it sat in the National Time Administration building in Union Square. I'd been through it many times now, but most of those had been NTA training trips. However, two of the trips through the portal
had been completely different. On both, I'd come close to not making it back alive.

Now here I was on my first official investigation and I could feel the jitters starting. Would I make it back from this one?

‘No, Kannon, I will not
leave it alone
!' As I was getting quieter, Honeycutt was wrenching his volume dial up to the max. ‘I can't just watch you go.' He flung an angry hand towards the door, as though I was about to leave. ‘Seymour-fucking-Kershaw is sending you back to a violent, treacherous frontier town in the middle of a war.'

‘Yeah, yeah.' I kept my tone light. ‘Now tell me something I don't know.' I fought the urge to smack him, just to stop him from talking.

‘And old Santa Fe is the least of your troubles. What if Coyote Jack did steal Hector's diary? Are you going to go after him?'

I turned away. Evading …

Honeycutt moved to face me. ‘Are you, Kannon? Will you go after a ruthless killer who's just massacred a coach full of men, women and children? A vicious murderer who slaughtered them just because he doesn't like the colour of their skin?'

I didn't reply.

Honeycutt leant in. ‘I know you, Kannon. I know what you're capable of — and it scares the living crap out of me.'

I didn't say it was doing the same thing to me.

He grabbed my shoulders. ‘Kannon, you can't even take anything back to protect yourself.'

‘Yeah, I know, Honeycutt.' My fear had turned into exasperation. ‘No anachronisms allowed. I know!'

‘No modern weapons, no high technology. Nothing through the portal that wouldn't naturally exist in that era.'

I pushed his hands away. I can't stand being patronised. Not even by him. ‘Honeycutt, don't recite the risks to me!'

When a time traveller enters the past, they create a temporary lacuna, a time warp. And when they return to the present that time warp disappears and the past reassumes its normal shape, unchanged. The past can't be changed, but when a time traveller dies in the past their body disappears along with the lacuna. Which means you can't be rescued.

If you die in the past, you stay dead. End of story.

And that was why Klaasen and Melnick had refused the job.

I felt fury surge over me like a suffocating blanket. It was always going to be this way — I'd get the cases those two morons rejected, the really dirty and dangerous ones.

I eyed Honeycutt, considering how best to derail his efforts to save me from myself. ‘Don't worry, Daniel, I'm going to talk this all over with Des.' Then I changed the subject. ‘So what did the real-estate agent say?'

‘Don't bullshit me, Kannon, I know that hellion look. You'll railroad Des no matter what he says.'

‘Tell me what the real-estate agent said!' I snapped.

‘Okay! Okay!' he snapped back. ‘She said their files on Lindthorpe Enterprises are missing. And there's no forwarding address because they skipped town about three weeks ago without paying their rent. She said you were about the tenth person to call about them since then.'

Hmm. I digested that. ‘So the break-in could've been about them.'

Honeycutt didn't answer.

‘That's good news,' I prompted.

He shot me a look. He wasn't going to give up. ‘Kannon, I've been to the old West …'

‘You never told me that.'

He gave me a pointed glare. ‘Kannon, it's a bad, violent time. It's the frontier, the very heart of hostile territory. And white women don't —'

‘Yeah, yeah, it's not safe — I get that!' Then I glared back at him. ‘But I'm thinking it's safer than Hiroshima the day the atom bomb was dropped. Don't you?'

‘That's …' He stopped, unable to answer my counterattack.

‘That's different, is it? What … because I'm female?'

‘No! Because it's my job.'

‘Yeah, Honeycutt, and this is
my
job! But I know what this is really about. We both know.'

Honeycutt shut up.

On our last mission he hadn't told me much about his background but circumstances had forced a precious few details into the light. When Daniel was fifteen his beloved younger brother, Kyle, was shot and killed in an accident at their military school in Louisiana. He'd never forgiven himself for not being there to prevent it.

That's why Daniel had stepped in front of the bullet meant for me.

That's why he saw himself as my bodyguard.

And that's why he was doing everything he could to stop me from taking this case.

‘I'm going to do my job, Honeycutt — just like you do yours.'

We exchanged glare for glare. But I could see past his anger to the fear. It was unnerving.

Rattled, I turned my back on him, reaching for papers to shuffle.

‘Kannon …'

I turned back again, my reply as crisp as I could make it. ‘Yes?'

Daniel's expression had changed. The fear was now contained by determination. ‘Okay, Kannon, you win. If I can't stop you then I'll have to help you.'

I frowned. ‘Help me with what?'

‘Kannon, that's why I came back so early from my mission. To make sure I saw you before you left on your first official case. To help you.'

I shook my head. ‘Help me? How can you?'

‘There are ways. You can't take most kinds of high technology with you, especially weapons — but there are other things you can do. Other ways to beat the NTA regulations … ones that all the marshals use.'

I didn't let the wave of relief show. ‘What are they?'

He held up one hand. ‘But trade for trade, Kannon: you have to make me a promise first.'

‘What is it?' I said, suspicious. ‘I'm not going to promise to play it safe. If I take this mission I have to follow where the trail leads me.'

‘I know that, Kannon. I know you … But you have to promise me that you will not be late for your due time of return.'

The NTA's fancy time technology had some drastic limitations. There was no way to communicate with or even monitor a time traveller once they went through the portal. The only way to keep track of them was through their due time of return. If they were late, a special rescue team was automatically sent through the portal after them.

‘Don't worry, Honeycutt, I'll be okay.'

‘You'd better be on time, Kannon,' he warned me. ‘You'd better not be late home. Because if you're even one second over your due time of return then I'm going to come through the portal after you.'

I gaped. ‘But you can't, Daniel! They won't let you!'

He was deadly serious.

‘No, Daniel! If you managed to force your way through the portal not only would that be the end of your career, but as soon as we got back the NTA would arrest you and put you in the deepest, darkest gaol they could find!'

Lightning lit his features; his jade-green eyes gleamed. ‘Then don't be late.'

The wave that'd swept through the time portal peaked and departed, leaving me standing on top of a dusty hill. The heat was stifling. I squinted under the brim of my hat. After rainy San Francisco, the New Mexican sun was brutal, piercing me like an arrow from a clear blue sky. I sought protection in a grove of pine-cone-covered pinyon trees; they gave me cover while I oriented myself.

It was noon at the start of summer in 1867 and I was standing on a hilltop in the long desert valley that held Santa Fe.

Around me the snow-capped tops of three sets of mountains shimmered blue in the heat. The Jemez were to the west, the Sandias to the south and the mighty Sangre de Cristos — the Blood of Christ — to the northeast. The Sangre de Cristos, with peaks over twelve thousand feet high, stretched all the way up to Colorado. Santa Fe itself was over seven thousand feet above sea level and the elevation could cause
altitude sickness. But I was fit and knew exactly how to ameliorate the symptoms.

Just below me, to the south, lay the city of Santa Fe, a vestige of Imperial Spain's North American empire …

It was a cluster of mainly adobe houses with taller, more stately buildings lining the central plaza, which held the Palace of the Governors — the administrative heart of New Mexico. On the other side of town flowed the Santa Fe River. It was the water supply for the population of seven thousand-odd people, three quarters of them of Hispanic ancestry. From here, it looked like all of them were in the central plaza and that someone'd stuck a big stick in and stirred 'em up like a hornet's nest.

The massacre at Dry Gulch had roused their worst fears.

I scanned the southeast. A few hours away in that direction a troop of US cavalry was reluctantly trudging back towards the packed town square. They were not the bearers of glad tidings. Unfortunately for the cavalry, their already incensed reception committee was going to have a long wait in the hot sun. Every now and again an angry roar surged up to me. Santa Fe was not happy with the bad news that a forward army scout had brought them — the search for the Dry Gulch killers had not been a success.

According to the records I could scrape up, Hector Q. Kershaw was somewhere down in that hornet's nest. All I could find out was that he'd arrived in Santa Fe two weeks ago, managed to survive the Dry Gulch massacre two days later and was due to catch the stagecoach out of town next week. Which meant his diary, if indeed it did exist, was somewhere down there too. I had to find out what happened to it.

Which meant I had to find Hector.

Spanish voices touched my ears. The translator hidden there kicked in.

‘Hail Maria, full of grace …'

Just twenty feet away, a layer of black-clad bodies covered the very peak of the hill like a cloth skin. About fifty Hispanic women lay prostrate before a tall, wooden cross. The women hadn't seen me yet; the deep shade kept my secret.

In this time New Mexico had been US territory for only the past nineteen years; one of their trophies, together with California, of the 1848 Mexican – American War. For the previous three centuries it'd been proclaimed Spanish and then, after Independence, Mexican land. But the Spanish had wrenched the territory away from the various Native American nations who'd made this their home first.

The very topsoil of this land was drenched with the blood and the tears of centuries of territorial warfare …

The women's voices carried on the desert wind. ‘Holy friars, we beseech you … Preserve us from our enemies, we are weak and cannot withstand the sacrifice you made.'

New Mexico, yet again, was at the start of another armed conflict.

The women were praying for heavenly intercession from their holy dead. They were praying before the Cross of the Martyrs after all.

Santa Fe's full name was
La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís
— the Royal Town of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi. It was founded in 1608 as yet another bastion of the ever-expanding empire that Spain had sliced for itself out of the fabric of North and South America. Colonisation
by Spain had brought this land the cold steel of the conquistadors' swords and the equally sharp-edged zeal of their religious orders.

But the Native American nations of the southwest had not gone quietly. They took their vengeance against Spain. In 1680, after years of crushing oppression, they overran Santa Fe and held it for twelve years. The hilltop cross that the women bowed before was a memorial to twenty-one Catholic martyrs — all Franciscan missionaries — who died in the revolt.

These black-clad women knew very well that the city of Santa Fe had been taken back by the native people before. So today, in the baking noonday sun, they prayed with the desperation and fervour of mothers who risked their children and husbands to the unswerving hand of fate.

I moved from the shadows, my saddlebag over my shoulder.

The youngest present, a girl of perhaps twelve, gasped, ‘Mother of God.'

Ever vigilant, the others jerked their heads up to watch me with mouths agape. Two crossed themselves, unable to freeze completely. They stumbled to their feet and out of my path. It was time for me to descend. I had an appointment to keep.

The young girl whispered, ‘Who is he, Mama? Is he the answer to our prayers?'

My tall, muscular frame was also clad in the blackest of black … their mirror image in colour at least, but their opposite in all other possible ways.

I wore a leather vest over a shirt and pants, and a pair of crossed bandoliers, full of gleaming bullets, camouflaged my carefully flattened chest. A pair of black-handled pistols, made this very year here in Santa Fe, hung ready at my side.

‘Be quiet, girl!' the hissed reply came back. ‘Don't move an inch.'

What scared them was my dyed, fire-red hair. It hung down my back in two tightly dressed braids, Viking-style, and was partially covered by a black satin top hat. This was the mark of John Eriksen, a baby-faced killer. One of the most feared bounty hunters in the Wild West. He always wore black, the colour of mourning …

And no one was safe when he was around.