Tribal Ways Read Online Free PDF

with him.
    And isn’t that what any successful predator does? she reminded herself. She shivered. Such moments of identification as this, with a being who epitomized the very evil she lived to fight against, chilled her worse than the rapidly cooling prairie wind.
    She shook her head. A strand of her long chestnut hair had worked its way loose from her ponytail. The wind whipped it ticklingly across her face. The same wind teased her with little voices that hinted at meaning but never revealed it.
    The western sky was changing from blood to mauve. The sun was long gone. It was time to emulate it. She went back to her rental car, waved to the deputies and drove away.
     

    “D AMN !”
    Annja slammed a palm on the steering wheel. The rented car’s motor was jerking and coughing. Jouncing along the no-name dirt track, severely rutted before even the spring rains came in earnest, wasn’t making the car any happier.
    The day’s final 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