by Pamela Clare
Inside, Pauline sobbed.
“No! Let me! She’s afraid of you!” Outraged by the cop’s insulting comments and his bullying manner, Kat turned to help, but the ranger held her back, his arm clamped around her waist, his mouth next to her ear.
He spoke quietly, his breath warm on her cheek. “You’ll only get yourself arrested. I’ll handle it. You go back to your car and warm up.”
But right now Kat didn’t care about being cold, and she wasn’t about to leave the other women behind. Shivering hard, she rapped her arms around herself, took a step back and watched as the ranger bent down beside the cop and spoke to him.
She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but after a moment, the cop stood, glaring at him. “Fine. Do it your way, Rossiter, but it’s on your head.”
Then the cop stepped back, making room for the ranger, obviously furious at the ranger for interfering and ruining his good time.
The ranger knelt before the sweat lodge door, hands in his pockets. “It’s all right. No one’s going to hurt you. Come on out.”
Kat recognized that soothing tone of voice, and despite her anger, she knew the ranger meant what he said. She leaned nearer to the sweat lodge door and called out. “It’s okay, Pauline. You don’t have to be afraid. This one won’t hurt you.”
She saw the top of Pauline’s head and stepped back to make room for her and the other women, looking beyond the firelight, searching for Grandpa Two Crows and Glenna.
And then she saw.
A dozen squad cars were parked down below on the access road, lights flashing. Three fire trucks stood nearby. The Butte seemed to swarm with law enforcement, two officers holding German shepherds on leashes.
Police? Firefighters? K-9 units?
All of this—to stop an inipi?
Everything but the cavalry.
Fighting tears with every breath, she spotted both Grandpa Two Crows and Glenna just beyond the firelight, talking with a uniformed officer. She might have walked over to them and tried to help, but then Pauline was there, trembling and crying, soggy towel around her shoulders, the other women emerging one by one behind her, their faces pinched with fear.
“Come.” She met the ranger’s gaze, then turned away, taking Pauline by the hand. “Let’s get dressed.”
GABE WATCHED AS Katherine walked soaking wet and barefoot through the snow, shepherding the other women around to the other side of a blanket that had been strung up between two saplings, her quiet dignity an indictment.
He’d arrived to find three fire trucks and most of the cops in the county parked along the access road to the Butte, lights flashing. With that kind of response, he’d expected to find a frat party turned homicide or perhaps even arson. Instead, he’d found nothing more threatening than a sweat lodge ceremony—the same kind of ceremony that had been going on up here every Saturday night since before Gabe became a ranger.
He’d hiked up the Butte in search of the officer in charge of this clusterfuck to try to minimize the damage, only to see Sgt. Frank Daniels—one cop he’d never liked—dragging a woman out of the lodge by her hair. In a heartbeat he’d gone from irritated to fucking pissed off. And then he’d recognized her.
Katherine had fallen to her hands and knees, her long hair wet and hanging to the muddy ground, tears on her pretty face, the shock and fear in her eyes making him want to kick Daniels’s ass, to knock his balls into his throat, to drag him around by the short hairs and see how he liked it.
He turned on Daniels. “Do you want to tell me what in the hell you were doing?”
Beneath his coat, the son of a bitch was wearing Kevlar, the knuckles of his black leather gloves lined with buckshot. He was strapped and ready to fight. “We got an anonymous complaint that someone had seen flames up here and found—”
“I know that!” Gabe glanced toward the blanket, making sure no gung-ho cop was headed in that direction. “What I want to know is why having a campfire without a permit merits the use of physical force. These aren’t drug traffickers, Daniels. They’re unarmed, terrified women.”
“I’m under orders to vacate that little hut—or whatever they call it.” Daniels jerked a gloved thumb in the direction of the dome-shaped sweat lodge. “If they resist, we have to take it to another level.”
“It didn’t seem to me that anyone was resisting, least of all the woman whose head you nearly yanked off.” Gabe bent nearer, no longer masking his anger, his face inches from Daniels’s. “This land is under Mountain Parks’ jurisdiction. Knock off the Rambo act, got it? Now who the fuck is responsible for this mess?”
GABE PUT IN a call to his supervisor Chief Ranger Stone, then spent the next ten minutes trying to undo as much of the damage as he could, assuring Police Chief Barker that Indian people had always used Mesa Butte for ceremonies with the knowledge of Mountain Parks. No, Mountain Parks had never required the medicine men who ran the sweat lodges to pay for a permit because sweat lodges constituted a traditional use of the land and were religious in nature. Yes, they occasionally got phone calls from concerned citizens who saw the fire and didn’t know what was going on, but no one had ever filed a formal complaint. No, there had never been any problem with litter or property damage because the participants had always been careful to clean up after themselves.
Then Chief Barker fell back on city land-use codes, reading from his notebook. “It says here, plain as day, ‘No open fires on open-space land without a permit.’ Do you boys over at Mountain Parks enforce the law or—”
But Gabe didn’t hear another word. “Excuse me.”
Katherine stepped out from behind the blanket, now bundled into a heavy fleece jacket, her towel rolled up and tucked beneath her arm. She walked with the other women toward several parked vehicles at the top of the access road, then split off on her own, heading toward a big, black Dodge Ram.
He came up behind her. “Katherine.”
She ignored him, unlocked the door to her truck.
“Ms. James, I’m sorry. This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
She looked over her shoulder at him, jerked her door open. “No, it wasn’t.”
“Someone called an anonymous complaint to the police. If the call had come in to Mountain Parks, this never would have happened. The land is under Mountain Parks’ jurisdiction, so I expect there will be some shouting at city hall tomorrow. We’ll get it sorted out.”
She tossed her towel across the street then turned to face him. “While you’re sorting it out, think about this: tonight was a special women’s lodge called so that we could pray for a friend of ours who’s in the hospital with ovarian cancer. The police brought men with guns and dogs to stop our prayers. How would you feel if you were in church praying for a friend and got hauled out by your hair?”
“I’d be angry as hell.” He didn’t say that he hadn’t set foot in a church since grade school. “I’m sorry. I really am. But I’m not your enemy.”
“Then why are you here?” She crossed her arms over her chest.
“It’s my night on call”—lucky him—“and I was paged. I had no idea what was happening up here until I got here. By then it was already too late to do anything beyond damage control. I’m trying to find out how this happened, and I promise I’ll do everything I can to keep it from happening again.”
She seemed to consider this. “Thanks for getting that cop to back off”
“I’m sorry he hurt you. I’m going to report it, for what it’s worth, and you should, too.”
“I will.” She turned away, then hesitated and looked back at him. “And thanks again for saving my life.”
Around them, the other cars were backing up, turning, driving away, their tires crunching on the snowy gravel road.
“Hey, I told you. You saved your own life.” Then he remembered. “I have something that belongs to you.”
He felt in his pocket for the earring, then held it out for her.
For a moment she stared at it as if she didn’t know what it was.
Then a look of surprise came over her face, and she took it from him. “Thank you.”
“Have dinner with me.”
What the hell? Have you lost your fucking mind?
Apparently, he had. Not only had he asked her out—he hadn’t asked a woman out since he’d met Jill almost five years ago—but he seemed to be holding his breath while waiting for her answer.
“I’m sorry. I…I couldn’t.” She looked toward the line of red tail lights heading down the road. “I need to go. We’re meeting at Grandpa Two Crows’s to talk about this and finish our prayers.”
“Then how about lunch, something really informal?”
She climbed into her truck, slid behind the wheel, and for a moment said nothing, obviously thinking it over. “Okay, but only if you agree to find out everything you can about why this happened.”
Having conditions placed on an informal lunch date felt like more of a smack in the face than an outright rejection. “All right. It’s a deal. How about the Walnut Café at noon on Monday.”
“Noon on Monday.” She closed the door, and the truck roared to life.
And as Gabe watched her drive away, he wondered whether he truly had lost his mind.
PAMELA CLARE began her writing career as an investigative reporter and columnist, working her way up the newsroom ladder to become the first woman editor of two different newspapers. Along the way, she and her team won numerous state and national journalism awards, including the 2000 National Journalism Award for Public Service. A single mother with two teenage sons, she lives in Colorado at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Visit her website at www.pamelaclare.com.