Tribal Ways by Alex Archer Page A

right like a frightened rabbit to look for other threats. Instead, she softened and widened the focus of her eyes. It showed her only the blurry shapes of the diners who had been there a moment before. When she was eating in peace, alone.
    “Do I have a choice?” she asked.
    He laughed softly. “We always have a choice,” he said.
    He sat down across from her. “It just doesn’t always make a difference.”
    A mere quarter mile from her motel on the southwest outskirts of Lawton—not even a decent warm-up for long-legged Annja Creed—the Oklahoma Rose Café served a great breakfast.
    Annja regarded the outlaw biker lord across the Formica tabletop. Outside the sun was bright, if not too far up the sky; the sky itself was pale blue and brushed over with thin tufts of cloud. The wind buffeted the picture window to Annja’s right, and despite all that glorious sunshine she felt the chill beating from it like heat from a well-stoked woodstove. The diner itself was nice and toasty, though, and filled with the smells of good cooking.
    “How’re you walking these days?” she asked.
    “Gingerly,” he admitted.
    “Good.”
    He laughed.
    Annja’s server turned up. The tall, good-looking black woman in early middle age had light skin and straight auburn hair wound up on her head in something that irresistibly reminded Annja of soft-swirl ice cream. “Johnny Ten Bears!” she exclaimed. “What do you think you doin’, showin’ your face around here? This a respectable establishment.”
    “Yeah, well, I’m the exception to the rule, Ruth. Coffee, please,” he said with a wink and a big grin.
    Ruth went away shaking her head.
    “Don’t even try turning that charm on me,” Annja told him.
    “Wouldn’t think of it, Ms. Creed.”
    “You know my name?”
    He shrugged. “Turned out Billy White Bird, my head wrench, is a big fan. He recognized you. About an hour after you busted a pool stick on his pumpkin head and blew out of the Bad Medicine.”
    “Really.”
    He leaned forward and clasped his hands on the tabletop before him. It was a gesture of such schoolboy earnestness she almost laughed aloud. He had good hands, she couldn’t help noticing—big, strong, showing the calluses and scars of hard work despite his relatively few years. Only a few more than hers.
    “You and my people kinda got off on the wrong foot,” he said. “I apologize for that. Personally, and on behalf of my club.”
    “Whatever,” she said. She went back to eating. “Your family’s just full of coincidences, isn’t it?”
    He raised a brow.
    “I mean, you turning up like this,” she said.
    “You’re watched every moment you’re in Indian country,” he said, and he wasn’t grinning. “Not all eyes are friendly. And, uh—what was that about my family?”
    “The way your dad turned up in his cruiser on the county road north of the Bad Medicine the other night. To pick an example totally at random.”
    He shrugged. “He’s wired into the Nation, too. Not much happens in Troop G territory he doesn’t find out about.”
    “I got that impression.”
    “We wondered where you’d got to. Nasty night out.”
    “Yes, it was.”
    “I’d like to try my best to correct some misunderstandings you may have picked up along the way. The Iron Horse People Motorcycle Club is not your enemy.”
    “You put on a good act,” she said.
    He shook his head. “Anyway. First, you blundered into a place we feel very territorial about. Second, you perfectly fit the profile of the sort of person who should not be wandering into random road houses in western Oklahoma—and I don’t mean just Indian bars or outlaw biker bars. Or both. Or, well, at first glance you seemed to fit the profile. I guess you showed how wrong that was. Turned out, unlike your normal tenderfoot tourist, you know how to handle yourself.”
    She smiled thinly. “I like to think so.”
    “Plus, my father may have fueled some fires here I’d like to tamp down. We are