The Thunder Keeper by Margaret Coel Read Free Book Online Page A

the office. He flung open the door and stood back, waiting: the friendly, relaxed smile, the little wink. She stepped out into the corridor.
    â€œLet me know how the meeting goes,” he called.
    She kept going in the direction of her own office, the closed doors and oil paintings blurring past like moving trains. She’d forgotten how the game was played—Wes was right about that. But he was dead wrong about Vince Lewis. She would meet the man at the Ship’s Tavern and she’d find out what was going on at the reservation that was a matter of life and death.

7
    I t was almost three when Vicky struck out for the Brown Palace Hotel a block away, joining the knots of people scurrying along Seventeenth Street, umbrellas floating overhead. Skyscrapers rose around her, like the cliffs of a concrete canyon, the spires lost in the dense gray clouds. Rain spattered the pavement and pinged against the cars that crawled past, windshield wipers swinging in crazy rhythms. The air smelled of gasoline and stale food, so unlike the smells of sage and wild grasses that came with the rain on the reservation.
    At the Tremont Place intersection, she waited for the light to change. The traffic spewed flumes of dirt-gray water into the air. Across the street, the doorman at the Brown Palace stood under the striped awning and blew on a whistle, beckoning a cab half a block away. The whistling noise was muffled in the sounds of the traffic splashing past.
    On the diagonal corner, several men in dark raincoats stepped off the curb and started across Seventeenth Street, collars pulled up around their heads. Only one carried an umbrella. Vince Lewis. Tall, dark-haired, good-looking guy—movie-star type. Wes had gotten the description right.
    The others made a precision turn to the right and headed down the side of the hotel, but Lewis kept walking toward the entrance, shoulders held back, dark, curly head held high.
    The light turned green. As Vicky stepped off the curb in unison with the little crowd around her, she saw the black sedan bearing down Tremont Place. Instinctively she jumped back, stomach muscles clinched, fingers tightened around the strap of her black bag. She felt someone take hold of her arm and yank her out of the way as the sedan made a wide arc through the street, then bumped over the opposite curb and onto the sidewalk. She stood frozen in place. It was heading straight at Lewis. The man pedaled backward, holding out the umbrella, as if it might stop the oncoming destruction.
    There was a thud of compacted weight against bones and flesh. The man was thrown upward, suspended above the hood a half second before he crashed into the windshield and crumbled onto the sidewalk. The sedan bounced over the curb and sped through the red light. Traffic squealed to a stop, tires sliding on the wet asphalt.
    Vicky caught the last three numbers on the plate—672—and the make: a Camry.
    She broke through the other pedestrians and ran to the man on the sidewalk. One leg bent sideways over the umbrella, arms flung out, dark hair wet and matted about his head. Blood spurted through a gash that ran from his temple along his cheek and laid open the pink raw flesh inside. There was a stillness, an air of resignation about him, as if he knew that the most vital part of him was preparing to leave and there was nothing he could do.
    She dropped to her knees and curled her hand over the crown of his head to keep the spirit from departing, theway she remembered the medicine man treating her grandfather when she was a child.
    â€œSend an ambulance!” someone shouted into a cell phone.
    â€œLet me through. I’m a doctor.” A man’s voice came from behind. Vicky felt someone shove against her. Reluctantly she removed her hand and got to her feet. “Please don’t leave,” she said out loud so that the spirit would hear.
    A large man brushed past and dropped to one knee. He began probing the