It had been a real piece of good luck, finding this thing, although it was not the sort of object he would normally have touched, much less picked up and taken with him. After acquiring it, he’d visited one of the Indian museums to try and identify it. He thought it might be a fetish bundle; it looked like the ones in the museum. Whatever it was, finding it had given him the key to making this whole scheme work.

He still remembered, clear as day, when he’d found it.

He had come across it right after the flood on Mingo Creek—the one his Mingo development had caused. Not that he’d ever told anyone. He hadn’t really expected any problems, at least, not that soon. Just because he’d paid off the team doing the environmental-impact statement to ignore that little drainage problem that Sunnyvale was going to produce—

Of course, they hadn’t dared admit that, or they’d have been in just as much trouble as he would. So everybody had kept their mouths shut, and the worst thing that had happened was that a bridge had gotten washed out along with some creek bank, and the Army Corps had extended their flood-control project on Mingo to go a bit above Owasso. No big deal. Too bad that bridge was gone—there wasn’t enough money in the county budget to cover replacing it, so the hicks in the sticks would just have to do without it. It didn’t make a lot of difference to him.

They’d said that a big chunk of land had gotten washed out, that Mingo had temporarily changed its course, and the Army Corps had to put in a fair amount of work to get it to go back to its bed. Well, that was baloney. Rivers and streams changed their beds all the time in Oklahoma. They couldn’t point the finger at him, or at anybody. It just happened.

But he’d had to take a stroll down there himself, when it had happened, just to make sure that there was nothing that could point to him and his development as the cause. That was when he’d found his good-luck charm.

The little fetish bundle was simply lying on the ground beside the now-shrunken stream, in the middle of a flat patch of sand, as if it was waiting for him. God only knew where it came from; it was as clean as it was now. He picked it up.

And he still didn’t know why. But ever since that moment, things had been going all his way.