Marie went in while I pretended to make a call on my phone. All of a sudden I wished I’d brought the gun rather than leaving it in the car. Too late now. I spotted her in the bar, walking around the front counter, and then she went out of my field of vision. I moved over a bit, trying to get a different angle, but couldn’t see her. A few minutes passed. I wondered if she’d found Rick, and what she might be saying to him.
I waited a few more minutes, then walked over to a different window and looked inside. No Marie, no Rick. I’d promised that I’d let her talk to Rick without interfering, but I needed to keep an eye on them. I decided I’d give it a thirty count, then go in.
I hit twenty-nine, and readied myself to go inside and confront Rick and the gang. Just as I put my hand on the door, it opened.
“He’s not there,” Marie said. She looked frustrated.
“You sure?”
“Yeah. Checked the whole place, front to back. Even stuck my head in the men’s bathroom. Bad idea.” She shook her head.
“All right, let’s get out of here.”
“Wait,” she said. “Let’s go back in, see if anyone knows where he is.”
“You think that’s smart?”
“Come on, tough guy. Can’t hurt to have a drink.”
I stood there at the front door for a moment, then pushed it open.
MY EYES ADJUSTED to the darkness inside the bar, and I looked around. A solitary pool table, a battered Formica bar, and a dozen men—all Latino—staring at me.
The bartender sauntered over to us. He looked to be about forty—slender with a small goatee on his face. He wore a backward baseball cap with sunglasses on top, and I noticed the tattoo on his arm, in stylized cursive letters: SUR 13. On the other arm was a crude drawing of an Aztec warrior holding a woman. The Aztec Kingz. We were in the right place.
“Help you?” he said, not smiling.
“Bud Light for her, a Coke for me.”
Without being too obvious, I sneaked a glance around the bar. A few people were still watching us, but the attention our arrival had brought was dying down. We sipped our drinks and tried to look like we fit in. I stared at a college football game playing above the bar. Marie took out her phone.
After a few minutes, a man wearing a faded orange Denver Broncos shirt turned to us. Well, turned to Marie. In his inebriated state, I don’t think he even noticed me. The stench of hard liquor radiated from him.
“You from Globeville?” he said to her.
I could see her effort to mask her distaste. “No, we’re not from around here.”
“Commerce City? I got a cousin over there, lives by the oil refinery. Stinks like shit. Not him, the refinery. Well, he stinks like shit, too.”
“We’re from South Dakota. Just visiting,” she said.
“You a chola? You got pretty hair,” he said. “But the eyebrows ain’t right. You look like a tough girl. Chido.” He motioned to the bartender for another drink. “You want to do a shot? You ever had a Mexican Killer? Tequila and peach schnapps. Kick your ass.”
“No, thank you,” Marie said.
“Su pérdida. Los niños y los borrachos siempre dicen la verdad.”
This guy definitely spent a lot of time in this bar, so I reached over and tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, we’re looking for a friend of ours. Tall guy, long black hair, Indian dude. You know, Native American. Comes around here every so often. Name of Rick Crow. You see him lately?”
The drunk guy was losing interest in us. “No, ain’t seen nobody like that.”
There didn’t seem to be any point in hanging around Los Primos. The bartender hadn’t shown any sign of friendliness, and the other customers looked equally disagreeable. I signaled to Marie with a little motion of my head. We finished our drinks and left.
We started walking back to the car. I was disappointed we hadn’t gained even a shred of info as to where Rick might be. Marie had been pretty confident we could find him at the bar, and I didn’t know our next move.
All of a sudden, I heard footsteps coming behind us. Fast. I looked around and saw a man about a block away running toward us.
“Stop!” the guy yelled. I checked to see if there was someone else he might be chasing. No, he was after us, and from the speed he was going, it didn’t look like he wished us well. I turned around to see what the possibilities were in the event of a confrontation, which seemed imminent. We were in an industrial area with no cover available. I calculated whether we could make it to the car—and my gun—before the guy caught up. Not enough time. There was only one option.
“Get behind that dumpster!” I barked at Marie. “Hurry!”
“I will not,” she said, “it’s filthy over there—”
“Hide behind it now, or I’ll throw you in!”
She scurried over to the large trash container. I ducked around the side of the building in the alley.
“Hey!” the man yelled, looking down the alley for me. I grabbed him from behind, trying to pin his arms. He broke my hold and faced me. I feinted a jab with my left hand. He went for it, opening up his side. I used the opening to land a hard blow to his face. He made some garbled sounds as he bent over and tried to shake off my punch.
I used that split second to assess him. Latino guy, a little older, big dude, short hair. Dressed in black jeans and flannel shirt. Standard gang wear. Couldn’t see any weapons, but that didn’t mean anything. I had to get him down before anyone else joined in to help.
I moved behind so I could force him down. Suddenly the world went gray as he hit me with a hard uppercut to my jaw. Hadn’t seen that coming. I reeled backward and tried to stay up, attempting to clear my head.
“Asshole!” Marie screamed at the guy, and I tried to place where she was. My vision was blurry and hazy, but I saw her start to pound the guy on his back.
This was bad. The guy turned his attention to her, and that bought me another moment. There was only one thing to do. The knife.
I pulled it out of my pocket and tried to open it. Because of its design, the Spyder was a bitch to get open, especially when you were half-unconscious. I saw the guy struggle with Marie and tried to keep my focus on unlocking the weapon.
Finally. I got the thing open, its curved blade shimmering like a deadly talon. It was super sharp, with a serrated hawkbill edge that would carve up flesh, tendons, muscles. If the guy wouldn’t back off, I’d do what I had to.
I thrust the knife forward, only to look up and see a handgun pointed straight at my chest.
11
Drop the knife. Now.”
The gun remained pointed at me. I dropped the knife. He kicked it away.
“Get on the ground! Facedown. Put your hands behind your head.”
I complied.
“Do you have any other weapons?” he asked.
It was beginning to dawn on me. “Are you a police officer?”
“Do you have any concealed weapons?” he asked again.
“No, just the knife. Look, I didn’t know you were—”
“Just be quiet and keep your hands on your head.” Then he turned to Marie, who was now standing back by the trash dumpster, her hands up in front of her. “Do you have any weapons?”
“No. Look, we’re just—”
“Get down on your knees,” he said to her. “Put your hands on your head and keep them there.” He put the gun back in his pocket and patted my legs, torso, and arms. Then he moved to Marie and did a quick pat-down on her. He seemed to relax a bit after he determined that we didn’t have any guns on us.
“Both of you can sit up, but keep your hands where I can see them.”
“Are you going to put handcuffs on us?” Marie said.
“No. Just want to ask a few questions.” He turned his attention to me. “Why’d you hit me? Did somebody send you?”
“You’re a police officer, right?” I said. He didn’t say anything. “Look, we didn’t know you’re a cop, we thought someone from the bar was coming after us
. If you’d identified yourself, we—”
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “Why are you asking for Rick Crow?”
“You know him?” I said.
Before he could respond, Marie said, “We’re from the Rosebud Indian Reservation. In South Dakota. We’re looking for Rick because he might be bringing drugs to our community. We just want to speak to him, find out what’s happening.”
I looked over at Marie, trying to signal her that we should be cautious and not say too much until we knew more about what was going on. But, to my surprise, the guy pulled out a scrap of paper from his pocket and a pen and started writing.
“We need to talk,” he said, “about Rick Crow. But not here. Meet me there in two hours.”
I looked down at the paper. “Taco Mex, Colfax and Joliet,” it read.
TACO MEX TURNED OUT to be a little Mexican restaurant in a different part of the city, about an hour away from where we were. We had some time, so we looked at the menu. Tacos, no surprise there, but with fillings I hadn’t heard of. Buche, tripas, lengua, cabeza. Pork stomach, intestine, beef tongue, cow head. Anticuchos de corazón. Skewered beef heart.
My own heart had been skewered enough, so I tried some cow-head tacos. Greasy, but tender. I offered Marie a bite, but she declined with a grimace.
I glanced over at her. She was eating her rice and bean tacos after carefully removing all of the chili peppers and placing them on a napkin. That didn’t surprise me; she’d always had some strange eating habits, even though she loved to cook. She wouldn’t eat pork, because she claimed that pigs were as intelligent as humans, if not more so. She detested brussels sprouts, said they smelled like feet, but was crazy about roasted carrots. I remembered there’d been a period in elementary when she would only eat chocolate pudding and cold french fries, which she would mix together in a large bowl and eat with a wooden spoon. The other kids had teased her relentlessly about that, but she was used to it by then.
The mocking and bullying she’d endured had toughened Marie, and she became the kid who stood up for others. I guess her time as a pariah had made her sensitive to the plight of the tormented. I fell in love with her, as much as an eleven-year-old can, when she defended me one day.
I’d been walking home from school when the mean kids pressed their advantage—the fate I’d feared most then. A gang of cruel girls decided to taunt me mercilessly, calling me iyeska, insulting my family and our poverty, which was extreme even for the rez. I remember looking down at the ground during this jeremiad, trying to disappear into an anthill, when Marie wandered by. She immediately saw what was going on and dove into action. She teased one of the bullies about a birthmark on her face, another one’s ugly shoes, and a third’s outdated hairstyle. The mean girls were absolutely overwhelmed and quickly fled.
You’d think I would have been grateful to Marie and at least expressed my thanks, but instead I projected my anger and humiliation onto her and left without saying a word. After that, I avoided her, just as I tried to elude my own shame and sorrow.
Of course I saw Marie around in high school—she was the smart girl with the weird clothes, half Osage, the one putting up posters for PETA and the World Wildlife Fund. I, on the other hand, focused more on drinking beer, lifting weights, and listening to heavy metal music, even paying forty bucks for a Slayer tattoo on my shoulder. Marie’s father was elected to the tribal council during this time, which put even more pressure on her. Reservation politics, then and now, are a cesspool of nepotism and favoritism, and grudges and feuds run deep. Marie tried to stay out of the fray, but she would be drawn in to disputes and clashes, even though none of it was her doing.
I lost track of her after high school, although I’d see her in passing at the grocery store or gas station. As for me, I wandered through years of crappy jobs in Mission, Valentine, and Rapid City. Because of drinking and general fucking up, I was fired from jobs in construction, roofing, auto repair, and dishwashing. I had some girlfriends, but nothing serious. One girl said she loved me, but then she ran off with a dude from Pine Ridge.
My career as a hired thug began when Lonnie, one of my high school buddies, told me about his sister, Angela. She’d been living with her boyfriend in Norris and was five months pregnant. The boyfriend had gotten blackout drunk and got it into his head that the father of the baby was another man. So he beat the crap out of her, trying to end the pregnancy. He succeeded. She miscarried the next day but kept quiet about it. Lonnie found out and called the tribal police. They referred the case to the feds, who didn’t even bother to interview Angela in person. Instead, they just did a phone call and declined to prosecute, calling it a standard spousal abuse case, not worth their time. Two months later Angela killed herself and her cat, leaving nothing living in the tiny house. She’d wrapped the dead cat up in a little star quilt that had been intended for their baby.
Lonnie told me this story a few months after it happened. He was a pretty stoic guy but broke down during our conversation. I felt something twist inside myself like a razor blade, and I told Lonnie that I’d take care of the boyfriend, whose name was Rulon. I tracked him down in Two Strike, already shacked up with another woman. After I finished with him, he wasn’t able to make a fist or turn a doorknob again, and I hoped the asshole would think about Angela and their baby every time he had to ask for help. Lonnie tried to give me some money for what I’d done, but I wouldn’t take it.
Word got around after a while, and others began to approach me, asking to help them get some justice. Sometimes they called it revenge, but I suppose that depended on your point of view. At first I only took a few jobs, ones where I was really angry over the circumstances, like the case where a guy forced his young niece to perform sex acts on him. But over time I became less picky, and I took almost any job. I didn’t think too much about it—after all, if the cops wouldn’t do anything, what was wrong with a private enforcer taking action?
Yeah, I liked the fighting. Ambushing some asshole, pounding the crap out of him, teaching him a lesson—I never felt so alive as when I was administering some righteousness. When I started fighting, I’d lose myself, enter a zone where I stopped thinking. Often I’d forget who it was I was pounding and begin to imagine I was back in junior high school. It was like being in a dream, except that the fighting began to feel like my real life, and everything else felt hollow, fake. One time I was hired to beat a guy who’d broken his girlfriend’s arm, so I broke his, then made him lick the filthy public toilet at the convenience store until he vomited and passed out. I knew I had a problem, but there was no support group for hired vigilantes.
Marie never liked the way I made my money, and it became an issue in our relationship over time. She and I had met again some years after high school, and we had our first adult conversation at the Derby, an Indian bar in Valentine, Nebraska. Natives knew to stay out of the other three taverns in town, unless you were looking for a fight with a group of drunken white dudes.
I’d been drinking some Bud Lights, waiting for the pool table to open up, and she’d sat down next to me. I looked at her in surprise and we started a conversation, a conversation that continued for the next few years, until I said the one thing that Marie couldn’t forgive. The words I wanted to take back more than anything.
“Let’s move over here.”
Startled, I looked up from my tacos and my memories and saw the guy I’d nearly knifed just two hours earlier, and who might have shot me. The cop dressed like a gang member.
We moved to a table outside on the patio, away from the other customers.
“Thanks for driving out here.” He grabbed a Jarritos coconut soda from the counter and sat down. “All right, tell me what you know about Rick Crow. You two from the same area as him?”
“We are,” I said. “So what’s going on? He under investigation?”
“Let me ask the questions,” he said. “You said something about drugs on the reservation. Tell me the details.”
Marie a
nd I looked at each other. She shook her head a little.
“Can we ask who you are, who you work for?” she said.
“Yeah, sure. I’m Dennis, DPD,” he said. “We’re investigating some individuals in the area.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a card. I couldn’t make out the fine print, but I think the word police was on there.
“Uh, don’t you have to show us your badge?” Marie asked.
He smiled. “No badge, just this. All right, let’s hear about the drugs.”
I glanced over at Marie. She gave a little shrug with her eyebrows.
“Well, some guys brought heroin to the reservation last week,” I said. “They gave some to my nephew. He took it and overdosed, nearly died. I heard Rick might be part of that.”
Now he looked more interested. “What type of heroin was it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Black tar, white powder, brown powder.”
“Don’t know.”
“Do you know when they started selling? On the reservation?”
“Not sure. Nathan—my nephew—said they gave it to him for free, he didn’t pay for it. Maybe that’s just BS, though; he’s only a kid.”
“You say they gave it to him?”
I nodded.
He took a drink of his coconut soda. “How old is your nephew?”
“Fourteen.”
“So the transaction, it occurred on reservation land, you’re sure?”
“Yeah,” I said. “At the high school. That’s what Nathan told me.”
He took out a small notepad from his pocket and started writing. “I’ll need to speak to your nephew, get a statement.”
“Sorry,” I said, “but why does he need to talk to you? I just told you everything.”
“Part of an ongoing investigation. Would he be available to speak to me on the phone?”
“No. He wouldn’t.” I got up and threw my trash away.
“Look,” he said. “I’ve been tracking these mutts for a while. I know they’re starting to move their product to reservations, but couldn’t confirm it. Until now. Been dealing with a boatload of jurisdictional bullshit, too. DEA, FBI, they all claim authority. Your nephew gives me a statement, I can start moving against these guys, get there first. Understand?”
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