Stolen Lives : The Lives Trilogy Book 1 Read Free

if to say, What am I supposed to do?
    A tear ran down the boy’s face as he sobbed, “I wanna go home!”
    “Yeah, sure,” Ron said with a laugh.
    “Why?”
    Frank shrugged, waved the gun and said, “We don’t need you anymore.”
    The boy looked down at the ground and then up at the men.
    “I want to go home,” the boy said again.
    “Sorry, kid,” Frank said, popping the cartridge and then palming it back into ready position.  “Got orders.”
    “No one will find me,” the boy said in panic.
    Ron laughed and then spit. “That’s the fuckin’ point!”
    The thought of being left alone in this place, this desert, with no one or nothing around him except for some sheep grazing in the distance and a hawk circling high up in the sky, made him feel desperate.
    “Please?”
    “Sorry kid,” Frank said, walking behind him, putting a hand to the boy’s shoulder, making him kneel down.  “You won’t feel a thing.”
    The boy shut his eyes, steeling himself against the blast of the gun.  Frank stepped behind and away from the boy, aimed at the back of the boy’s head and pulled the trigger twice.  The boy fell forward, still handcuffed his face in the hot desert sand.  Frank was right.  The boy never felt a thing.

CHAPTER TWO
     
    George Tokay sat among the pinion pine and Joshua trees on the side of the mountain after he had hidden his horse behind the ridge.  He had heard the van even before it had appeared in the distance and had watched as it drove onto his grandfather’s land, suspecting rustlers.  Because the land where his family’s sheep grazed was so remote, it happened often.  Like his grandfather had taught him, George sat in the shadow, the sun to his back.  That way, anyone looking for him would be looking almost directly into the sun. 
    Shadow.
    Hiding in the shadow fit, because Shadow was the name given to him during his coming of age ceremony two years ago when he was twelve up on the mesa where he and his grandfather honored Father Sun.  This was a ritual they had done together every day since, rain or shine.  It began in the dark of early morning and ended as the sun peaked over the rim of the mountains.  He wasn’t singing now, though, and he wasn’t with his grandfather.  He was as alone as the boy.
    George felt pity for him, disgust for the men, and curiosity as to why anyone would want to strip a boy naked, handcuff him and execute him.  He chewed on his lower lip and then stopped himself.  His grandfather had often, too often, reminded him that one of the Dine’ —one of the Navajo people—didn’t give away one’s thoughts with expressions on one’s face.  Eyes shut, he held his breath, then let it out slowly and evenly, calming himself.  Then he raised his binoculars, studying the scene again.
    The fat man, with his back turned away from George and near the dead boy’s feet, pissed a puddle that was quickly swallowed up by the hot sand.  George watched as the fat man shook himself, then zipped up and faced the dead boy, muttering something to the tall, skinny man with the beard.
    George studied the fat man’s face; thick lips, broad, flat nose., dark brown hair, slicked with something other than sweat, parted sloppily on the right side of his head, big hands with thick, fat fingers, too far away to tell the color of the fat man’s eyes.  For sure, a biligaana , not interested in hozro .
    George shifted over to the tall, skinny man with the scraggly black beard, bare in spots, thick in others.  Not neat, but sloppy.  Something about the beard—hiding something?  Hair, brown.  Hands, small.  Fingers, narrow.  George watched as the skinny man pulled out another cigarette—Marlboro—and smoked, looking up into the hills, almost directly at George.  With the cigarette clamped in his teeth, the skinny man pulled out his pecker and he too, pissed near the dead boy’s body.
    George decided that, like the fat man, he was a biligaana .  Maybe Hispanic.