Crooked River

44

Coldmoon gripped the armrests while the plane once again rebounded in turbulence, the captain’s calm voice reminding everyone to keep their seat belts fastened. Christ, he hated flying almost as much as boating. The only reasonable way to travel, he thought, was by foot or car — or horse. Everything else was bullshit.

Back on the rez, there had been a lot of horses wandering around, free for the borrowing. Most were a bit wild, unshod and half-crazy, leftovers from the days when horses were sacred to the Lakota. Now people kept them for no good reason beyond tradition and nostalgia. But Coldmoon and his friends, as a lot of kids did in those days, would occasionally rope a random horse, bridle and throw a blanket on him, and ride him somewhere — if they could stay on — as an alternative to hitchhiking or walking. There was one horse in particular Coldmoon was fond of — he called him Mop because of the massive mane of blond hair. He fed him oats from time to time, which made it easier to catch him by shaking the bucket, and he trimmed his splayed hooves and wormed him. He didn’t know whom Mop belonged to, nobody did, but he wasn’t a bad horse. Riding him was fun. You didn’t get motion sick on a horse the way you did on a plane or boat, and you were in control, at least sort of. The idea of being thirty thousand feet up in a plane, strapped into a seat with nothing between you and the ground six miles down, where you were at the complete mercy of the pilots, and the air traffic controllers, and the mechanics who took care of the plane, and the engineers who designed it, and the weather, and bird strikes, and terrorists, and even to an extent the other passengers, freaked him out almost as much as the bottomless black water underneath a ship — where, with even the smallest boat, all it would take was one hole. And as boats got bigger and bigger they just had more systems that could break, or catch fire, or lose power and drift, or hit an iceberg, or fall to a rogue wave, or encounter Somali pirates, and then, boy, that’s all she wrote...

Another rumble and shake abruptly brought Coldmoon out of these morbid thoughts as the plane passed through more turbulence. They were above the clouds, and great thunderheads rose all around like gigantic fairy towers of white. Clearly the pilots were trying to make their way around a stormy area, and it looked pretty bad, with some clouds flattening into an anvil shape, signifying serious thunderstorms.

Lovely.

He forced his mind back to the case. In his conversation with Pendergast, he had relayed all he’d learned from his trip to Guatemala and Mexico. It was becoming quite clear this case involved something as big as it was bizarre — backed by a powerful, well financed, and widespread organization. Who they were, and what they were up to, remained as crazy a mystery as before. A hundred and twelve feet, crudely chopped off by their owners, deep-frozen, and then set adrift at sea. Why? And how the hell did everything link up: from Guatemala, coyotes and secret border crossings, unexpected apprehensions, to hacked-off feet floating in the Gulf of Mexico? In a criminal investigation, one of the first questions you asked yourself was: who benefits from this crime? But how would anyone benefit from people chopping off their own feet? For what purpose except to free themselves from shackles in the most extreme possible way — but even that had been ruled out.

Another jolt, and the voice of the captain came over the system, announcing that, due to severe thunderstorms, the flight was being diverted from Fort Myers to Tallahassee. There were the usual apologies while the passengers groaned and hissed.

Tallahassee. Where the hell was that in relation to Fort Myers? Coldmoon fished out the in-flight magazine and looked it up, then cursed under his breath. It was way up in the Panhandle, hundreds of miles to the north, a five-hour drive at least.

Another reason to hate flying, he thought.