Tribal Ways Read Online Free PDF Page B

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