Whirlwind Read Online Free PDF Page B

hastily.
    "The usual crap."
    "I read that they use them, you know. Kind of temporary, so to speak."
    He scanned the hillside, squinted at the vehi-cles. "Now don't take this wrong, all right? But there hasn't been a damn mountain lion around here for nearly as long as I've been working this job. And in case you hadn't noticed, they don't
    generally skin their meals before they eat them."
    "I don't need your sarcasm, Chuck."
    No, he thought; what you need is a good swat upside the head, keep you from bothering the hell outta me.
    The trouble was, this was the fourth animal he'd come across in just over a week slaughtered like this, and not a single sign, not a single print, not a single goddamn hint of what had killed them. Or rather, what had stripped off their hides. For no reason he could put a ringer on, he didn't think they had been killed first. He reckoned the creatures had either died of the shock or had bled to death.
    Just like he was about to die of the smell if he didn't get out of here.
    He brushed a hand over his mouth as he turned and walked back to the car. Donna followed him slowly, humming to herself and snapping her fingers.
    The thing of it was, Sparrow thought as he slid down the shallow ditch and took two grunting strides up the other side, if this was confined to just animals, there wouldn't be such a stink of another kind in the office.
    That there were also three people dead, obvi-ously of the same thing—whatever the hell that was—had put the fire on. So to speak. And every time someone called in with another claim, it was Sparrow who personally checked it out. It wasn't
    that he didn't trust any of his deputies. Thirty-five years roaming the side roads of the desert, talking to the Indians in Santo Domingo, San Felipe and the other pueblos, getting to know the hills and mountains until he could walk them practically blindfolded, did that to a man—made him the so-called area expert, even when he didn't want to be, hadn't asked to be, and would have given his right arm just to be plain stupid.
    He reached in the driver's-side window and grabbed the mike, called in and told the dis-patcher what he'd found and where. While Donna watched him distrustfully, he ordered a van to pick up the carcass, and a vet standing by to handle the examination. When he was finished, he dropped the mike onto the seat and leaned back against the door, arms folded across a chest nearly as broad as the stomach below it.
    "You think you might go talk to Annie?" She stood in the middle of the two-lane road, sketch-ing senseless patterns in the dust that turned the blacktop gray.
    "What for?" He waved vaguely to his right. "Her place is too far away"
    "Might be one of hers."
    "Probably," he admitted. Then he gestured toward the hill, meaning what lay a mile or so beyond, what some of the locals called the Konochine Wall. "Might be one of theirs, too, you ever think of that?"

    She didn't look, and he smiled. Donna Falkner didn't much care for the Konochine. For years they had refused her offers to broker whatever craftwork they wanted to sell; once they had even chased her off the reservation. Literally chased her, yelling and waving whatever came to hand, as if they wanted to drag her up Sangre Viento Mesa and drop her off, just as they had done to the Spanish priests and soldiers during the Pueblo Revolt over three hundred years before.
    The difference was, the Spaniards never returned to the Konochine. No one knew why.
    Now there was a middleman, Nick Lanaya, who worked with her, so she never had to set foot on the reservation at all.
    "Satanists," Donna suggested then, still toeing the blacktop, hands in her hip pockets.
    Sparrow snorted. He had been through the entire list of the usuals, from Satanists all the way to half-assed dopeheads who thought they could bring on a better world by chopping the heads off calves and goats. None of them, as far as he knew, killed like this, or killed both animals and people quite so