Bone Walker: Book III of the Anasazi Mysteries Read Online Free

as a means of placating little suburban ghosts and witches.
    “This is a fool’s errand,” he murmured to himself in irritation.
    He should have been in Santa Fe eating pollo marengo at the Pink Adobe with his adopted son, Dusty, and his friend of twenty years, Dr. Maureen Cole. Not out here. Not on a cold night like this.
    Moonlight gilded the canyon rim a quarter mile to the south, and the weathered sandstone shone with a knuckle-white luminosity that mimicked freshly stripped bone. Cracks, fissures, and irregularities in the stone cast raven shadows.
    Rains had washed little rivulets into the trail. Stones tried to roll under Dale’s feet. He stopped, took a deep breath, and winced against the pain in his knees. His frosty breath rose pale in the cold night air. No wonder his knees hurt. Power and time were carnally entwined like two perverted lovers.
    He was too old to be out here chasing a wild goose, but he had to find out if what he knew in his heart was the same truth his head had denied all these years.
    What happened to you that night, you old fool?
    The question rolled around in his mind like a polished stone. It had been a fool’s errand—even back then. A dare that his “Western” mind had taken, and for which he now had no explanation except bad knees and an illusive but mocking memory. The problem was, he’d slipped that night, twenty-five years ago, fallen … and when he’d awakened the picture lodged in his mind had been so clear that he couldn’t tell if it had been an artifact of the midnight fall, or a sight he’d seen with his eyes. He’d never known for sure.
    The vision was of a sand painting on a cave floor. In the carefully poured grains of colored sand, he’d seen his image: a white man wearing a brown hat, with a trimmed beard, blue jeans, and western-style shirt. His hair had only been threaded with gray then. But it had been him. He’d known it.
    Then he’d seen the three naked witches in the back of the cave, illuminated by firelight. One, a tall, pirouetting form, wore only a wolf katchina mask. Smooth muscles had rolled under sweat-shiny skin as the katchina dancer lifted his bow and shot a yucca-leaf arrow into the sand painting’s knee. Dale had felt a terrible pain, like glassed fire, under his right kneecap. As the macabre dancer shot a second arrow, Dale’s left knee exploded in agony. He remembered crying out, falling into a gray abyss. Falling …
    Hours later he’d come to, dazed, almost unable to walk, and practically had to crawl back to where he had left Dusty and the horses in a nearby arroyo.
    For more than twenty-five years he had wondered what had happened to him that night. And then this morning, she had called. Was that why he’d come here, to this place? To the spot where he’d last seen her, where they had finally terminated what should never have been.
    Power and time. Cycles of the sun and moon. They all came together in Chaco Canyon. After thirty-seven years, almost to the night, he was back. At this place.
    It had been years since he had last heard from her. Her voice had been so clear over the phone line that morning that the intervening decades might not have been: “You’re not being funny, Dale.”
    “Funny?” he had asked, confused not only by her call after so many years of mutual silence, but by the subject of the conversation.
    “The note says, ‘We will meet at the center place where the ancestors climbed from the Shipapu into this world. In the corner house on the night when the dead live. Two cycles of the moon have come full. It is time to end what the four of us began. On the night of masks, at midnight, you shall make the journey. The wolf returns to its lair.’”
    “I didn’t send you any note.”
    “If you didn’t, who did? Who else knows about this?”
    “I intend to find out. Can you fax it to me?”
    “Dale … you know what this means?”
    His knees hurt worse, as if someone had injected habanero pepper juice into the