CHAPTER ONE

"Don't Throw Rocks at a Whirlwind—It Will Chase You"

Clay Ramsey lifted the battered tin box out of the bottom right-hand drawer of his writing desk. He turned on the desk lamp to compensate for the lack of light in the room because it was a sparse, late-winter day in Spokane, Washington. Shivering a bit, although not from the cold, Clay removed the string-bound packet of yellowed envelopes and the dog-eared, rubber-banded highway map from South Dakota.

Setting the maps aside, Clay turned to the packet of letters, freed them of their string binding, and studied the packet as though there could possibly be something new, even after more than a hundred such examinations. Each envelope bore his name; his adopted city of Spokane, Washington; and Mildred Clark's plainly scribed name, all in blue pencil. The earliest one, postmarked in 1969, showed its twenty-five years of age, yellowed and brittle, not at all like the hands that held it. The newest, if you can call an eleven-year-old letter new, was the only one with a return address. The rest, all in her firm hand, bore no witness to place or time. All of them linked her name to his by a thin blue line, drawn with little arrow points. Pushing his breath out between nearly closed lips, Clay thought his life was as tattered and flat as the letters. He stifled the oncoming rush of self-pity that he always felt when he faced Millie's little blue line and her carefully spaced arrow points. Clay rubbed the thin folds on the letters with his forefinger and then set them aside.

Voices, memories, images of people lost in time, just like me. Gingerly retying the string, Clay replaced the letters and put the map back into its protective tin coffin. His mind wandered back to 1973. Whose story was this anyhow? Maybe it isn't mine to tell, but by god, it ought to be.Hell, who can tell it better than me.

They came in with a gust of northwest New Mexico wind, a still winter wind, even though it was the first day of March. Nineteen seventy-four looked to be another dry year. The wind pushed bits of sand and dry grasses through the door of the Gallup city hall, which doubled as the McKinley County Courthouse. Two young Indians, herding a ghost white Anglo, made their way up the concrete steps on the east side of the building. The Indians, bony and anxious looking, wore Levi's jackets over flannel shirts, horsehair belts, last year's jeans, and beat-down boots. From a distance, they looked like brothers. Both were dark skinned and wore their black hair long. They had bloodred bandanas tied across their foreheads. Their captive, Delbert Rudy, fair skinned and frizzy haired, looking confused and dazed, stumbled his way up the steps. He didn't look like a captive, but he was.

Two middle-aged women, city employees working the front desk—busyin