X Files - Whirlwind Part 9

So much for the connection between them and the boy, Mulder thought.

"Mrs. Hatch," Scully began, and cut herself off at the woman's chiding look. "Annie. Have you had any trouble with people from the reservation?"

Annie blinked once, slowly. "No."

She's lying, Mulder thought, and looked to his left when he sensed movement. Nando Quintodo had taken a short step forward, one of his hands fisted at his side. When he saw Mulder look, how-ever, he stopped, his face bland, his hand quickly relaxed.

"Why do you ask?" Annie said.

"It's routine" Mulder answered before Scully, and grinned at her skepticism. "I know, it sounds like a line from a movie, but it's true. We've been told there's some trouble, and ..." An apologetic gesture. "We can't afford not to ask."

Scully echoed the procedure, and apologized as she took Annie through her story again. Mulder, meanwhile, stretching as if he were too stiff to sit, rose with a muttered apology and left the table. As soon as he took a step, Quintodo walked away from him, heading for the door.

Mulder spoke his name.

When the man turned, his hand was a fist again.

Mulder leaned against the porch rail and looked out over the lawn. He didn't raise his voice; he knew the man could hear him. 'Tourists ever call you Tonto?"

"Not here. No tourists here." Hat, unemotional. Careful.

"But sometimes."

There was a pause.

Mulder waited.

"Yes. In town. Sometimes." Still flat, still un-emotional.

Mulder faced him, leaning back against the rail, one hand in his pocket. "You're from ...?"

Quintodo's eyes s.h.i.+fted to the table, s.h.i.+fted back. "The Mesa."

"Your wife, too?"

He nodded.

"So tell me, Mr. Quintodo. Why would a woman like that want to lie?"

The sheriff, mumbling something to Annie, stood.

Quintodo saw him, and Mulder couldn't miss the flare of hatred in his eyes.

"Why?" he repeated softly.

But Sparrow was already on his way over, a mirthless grin beneath dark gla.s.ses. "Why what?" he asked, rubbing a hand over his chest.

"Why would I want to visit the stable when I don't ride?" Mulder answered. "I'll tell you why-because I'm a city boy and I'd like to be able to see manure firsthand."

"Very well, Mr. Mulder," Quintodo agreed before the sheriff could say anything. "I will show you everything. Mrs. Hatch, she has a pair of very fine horses. I think you will be impressed. Maybe you will learn something."

He nodded politely to Sparrow and went inside without looking back.

The sheriff hitched up his belt, and spat over the railing. 'This is a beautiful place.""Yes, it is."

"Annie's been alone out here for a long time, you know. Some say too long."

"I wouldn't know, Sheriff."

Sparrow spat again. "Let me give you some advice, Agent Mulder."

"Always ready to listen, Sheriff Sparrow. You're the expert around here, not me."

Sparrow nodded sharply, d.a.m.n right.

"Okay, number one is, Nando there is a Konochine. You know that already, I a.s.sume. Don't trust him.

He may live out here with Annie, but his heart's still over the Wall."

Mulder said nothing.

"Second thing is . . ." He stopped. He took off his hat, wiped sweat from his brow with a forearm, and shook his head as he walked back to the table.

Mulder watched him.

The second thing, unspoken, was a threat- The stable was gloomy, despite the open door. There were six stalls on either side, but most of them hadn't been used in a long time. A scatter-ing of hay on the floor. Tack hung from pegs on the walls.

When Mulder looked outside, all he could see was white light; the corral and the black horse were little more than ghosts.

Quintodo stood beside a chestnut, running a stiff brush over its flank. He hadn't looked up when Mulder walked in, didn't give a sign when Scully followed, unsure why Mulder had asked her to meet him out here.

Quintodo concentrated on his grooming. "You know what tonto means, Mr. Mulder?"

"My Spanish is-" A deprecating smile. "Lousy."

"Stupid" the man said, smoothing a palm over the horse's rump. "It means stupid." He reached into his hip pocket and pulled out a lump of sugar, handed it to Scully. "She won't bite. Just keep your hand flat, she won't take your fingers."

Scully offered the treat, and the horse snorted and snapped it up, then nuzzled her for more.

"She's a pig," Quintodo said, with a hint of smile. "She'll eat all you give her, then get sick." A loving pat to the animal's side. "Tonto."

With a look, Scully asked Mulder why they were here; he nodded a be patient, and put his back to the door. All he said was, "Why?"

Quintodo worked for several long seconds without speaking, the sc.r.a.pe of the brush the only sound.

Then: "She is one, you know."Mulder's head tilted slightly.

"Konochine. One of us. Her husband, Mr. Hatch, he met her in Old Town, in Albuquerque. She was fifteen, he was from Los Angeles. I don't know what they call it, looking for places to make a movie."

"Scouting," Scully said.

He nodded. "Yes, gracias. He told her about the movies, about being in them." The smile finally broke. "All h.e.l.l broke loose on the Mesa. But he was very persuasive, Mr. Hatch was. Very handsome, very kind. Very young and . . ." He hesitated. "Dreamy. Before we knew it, she was gone.

Making movies. Getting married." He looked at Mulder over the horse's back. "They were very happy.

Always"

The smile slipped away.

"No children?" Scully asked.

"Not to be."

The horse stamped impatiently, and Quintodo murmured at it before resuming his grooming.

"She is special, Mr. Mulder" he said at last. "She hears the wind."

Scully opened her mouth to question him, and Mulder shook his head quickly.

Quintodo swallowed, second thoughts making him pause.

When he did speak again, he spoke slowly- "We have priests, you know." The horse stamped again; a fly buzzed in the stifling heat. "Not the Catholic ones, the padres. Konochine got rid of them a long time ago. Our own. Seven, all the time. They ... do things for us. Comprende? You understand? Today they are all men. It hap-pens. Sometimes there are women, but not now. Priests are not . . ." He frowned, then scowled when he couldn't find the word. "They live like us, and then they die. When one dies, there is a ceremonial, and the dead one is replaced."

A two-tone whistle outside interrupted him. Mulder heard hoofbeats trot across the corral.

The chestnut didn't move.

"They know their call," Quintodo explained. "That was for Diamond."

"And the ceremonial?" Mulder prodded quietly.

Quintodo lowered his head, thinking.

"There was one now. Like the others, it lasted six days. No one is allowed to see it. But the wind . . .

the wind carries the ceremony to the four corners. Sometimes you can hear it. It talks to itself. It carries the talk from the kiva. The songs. Prayers. Mrs. Hatch . . ." He inhaled slowly, deeply, and looked up at Mulder. "Sometimes you think you hear voices on the wind, yes? You think it's your imagination, no?"

He shook his head. "No. But only some, like the kiva priests, can understand. Mrs. Hatch too can understand. We knew this recently, Silvia and I, we could tell because Mrs. Hatch was very nervous, very .. ." He gestured helplessly.

"Afraid?" Scully offered.

"I'm not... no. She didn't like what she heard, though." His voice hardened. "Never once since she came back from the movies has she been to the Mesa. Never once. She turned them down, you see. An old man died, and they wanted her to be in his place, and she turned them down. She had a husband, she said, and she had a way of her own. She would not go, and they never talked to her again."

"They don't have to," Mulder said, moving closer to the horse, keeping his voice low. "She hears them on the wind."

Quintodo stared at him, searching for mocking, for sarcasm, and his eyes narrowed when he didn't find it.

"These dead, Mr, Mulder, they didn't start until the ceremonial started."

Scully sidestepped nervously when the chest-nut tried to nuzzle her again, upper lip momen-tarily curled to expose its teeth. "What are you saying, Mr. Quintodo? That these priests killed those people out there? And the cattle? For a ... for some kind of-"

"No." He kept his gaze on Mulder. "Six days and six nights they stay in the kiva. Praying with the man who is to join them. Taking visions from the spirits to be sure they have made the right choice, and to show them the way until the next time. When they do all this, soon the wind blows." He made a rapidspinning motion with his free hand. "Whirlwind, Mr. Mulder. You know what I mean?"

Mulder didn't, and the man spat dryly in dis-gust at himself.

"Sangre Viento, Mr. Mulder. There are some who say they make the Sangre Viento."

A knock on the front door sounded thunderbolt-loud. Donna sat at her desk, a small secretary in the living room, working on the accounts. They added up, but not fast enough. If she was going to leave soon, on her terms, there would have to be more.

She was tempted to ignore whoever it was, pre-tend she wasn't home, then realized with a roll of her eyes that she could be seen through the room's picture window. With a martyred sigh, she scooped the ledger and papers into a drawer, pushed at her hair, and opened the door.

She couldn't believe it. "What are you doing here? It's practically the middle of the day."

"No. That's the wrong question. The right ques-tion is: have you been cheating me?"

A hand shoved her shoulder, hard, forcing her backward.

''Here's another one, chica: what do you think they would do if they found out?"

Mulder kept to himself on the way back to the Inn. They had declined Annie's invitation to lunch, promised to return for a nonofficial visit, and had visited the site where the couple had been murdered. It hadn't taken long; there wasn't much left to see, and when Sparrow asked, he only said it was too soon to make any kind of determination.

Once out of the car, Garson promising to see if he could set up an appointment with the hard-to-reach medical examiner, he went straight to the front desk and arranged for a rental car to be delivered that afternoon.

"I don't like being chauffeured around," he explained to Scully, leading her into the restaurant, complaining of imminent starvation. "Especially by him. He figures, but I don't know how yet."

Scully said that was the easy part. The man was clearly fond of Annie. Just as clearly, he intended, somehow, to make sure she didn't spend the rest of her life living alone, "He's after her money?"

"I don't know. It's been known to happen. You could see he was protective; he just wasn't loving."

They took a table in the far front corner, Scully facing the white-curtained window directly behind him.

They ordered, and he watched her fuss with her silverware, fuss with her napkin before spreading it on her lap.

"What?"

She didn't hide her exasperation. "I know what you're thinking, and I'm not going to let you turn this into something it isn't."

That, he thought sourly, was the problem with working with someone who knew you that well.

Still, there was no harm trying. More than once, she had saved him from making a total fool of himself, determined to keep him at least within screaming distance of reason.

"You heard what he said."

She nodded. "And it might even be possible that that couple, the Constellas, saw something they weren't supposed to. It might even be possi-ble they were killed for it. They wouldn't be the first to die because they'd witnessed a religious event meant to be secret." She held up a knife like a finger.

"Possible, I said, Mulder. Possible."

"Okay. Possible." And she smiled.