I grabbed a Mexican soda—tamarind flavor—and opened it up. “Would anyone see his statement—I mean, would his name be protected?”
Dennis shook his head. “No one will see it except for law enforcement.”
“Hold on,” Marie said. “We’ve been working with you. But you need to tell us what’s happening on the rez. With the drugs. Give us some background, maybe we can help you more.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Let me see your IDs.”
We handed him our driver’s licenses, and he walked off to his car.
“You think I should give him Nathan’s info?” I asked Marie, quietly. “Don’t know if that’s smart.”
She shrugged. “Let’s hear what he has to say. I want to know more about Rick, what he’s supposedly doing.”
Supposedly. From the cop’s interest in him, it looked like Rick was in pretty deep. But it made sense to get as much information as possible.
The cop came back to the table and returned our IDs to us. “Okay, everything checks out.” He paused. “I can’t tell you anything that’s part of the investigation, but I can give you the big picture—what’s already out there. Let me get some water first.” He got up from the table and returned with a plastic cup. “Okay, bear with me, I got to go back a little bit. You hear this, you’ll understand why we’ll need your nephew to cooperate.”
I nodded.
“How much do you know about opioids?”
“You mean heroin?” I said.
“Well, heroin is just part of it. Opioids—pain pills—are the biggest drug problem we’ve ever had. And created by the big pharma companies, pretty much.”
“Of course,” Marie said. “Overprescription. Not exactly a new thing.”
He took a gulp of his water. “Sort of. Few decades ago, the drug companies started selling pain pills—like OxyContin—and created a massive marketing program. Bad back? Here’s a scrip for oxys. Chronic pain? Take more oxys. Now you got a generation hooked on pills. Then the damn pill mills popped up—so you got even more addicts out in the boonies.”
Marie said, “Yeah, but the government shut down those clinics. That’s what I—”
“Not exactly,” he said. “Feds wised up and slapped the drug companies with massive fines, so they reformulated the pills. Can’t be crushed up and abused as easily. The pills are still around, but tougher to get and way more expensive. So what do the addicts do? Start taking heroin—same drug, different form.”
Marie looked at Dennis intently, like she wanted to argue with him. I wondered if Dennis smoked and if I could get a cig.
“You got an increasing demand for the stuff,” he continued. “But the supply hadn’t kept up. So some Mexican cartels start to focus on heroin instead of weed. But it’s not the white powder dope—it’s black tar, looks and feels like a Tootsie Roll. Easier to make and smuggle. Here’s the kicker: it’s ten times more potent than powder. We’re seeing black tar that’s seventy-five percent pure. China White heroin back in the day was maybe five percent.”
“Holy shit,” I muttered. Marie kept quiet.
“It gets worse. One of the cartels developed a new distribution system—a better method to get the drugs to the customers. They started using a decentralized structure. More efficient, more profitable.”
“What do you mean, decentralized?” I asked.
“They sell to the customers themselves—cut out the middleman. They set up dozens of small cells with drivers and a phone operator. Customer calls the mobile phone and gives his location, operator calls a driver who meets the customer in the parking lot of a burger joint. Buyer hands over his cash and gets a dope balloon. Just like ordering a pizza. In the old days, you had to go to the drug dealers, now they come to you. What’s more, they run specials, like every tenth balloon free, and they hand out samples like crazy, trying to create new customers.”
I remembered what Nathan had told me about getting the heroin for free. I’d doubted him, because I couldn’t believe someone would give away drugs.
Dennis drank the rest of his water and crumpled the plastic cup. “They’re like the Domino’s Pizza of dope. And they’re careful. They drive regular cars, nothing fancy, and switch drivers a lot. So you got a perfect storm: pill addicts looking for a fix, super-potent heroin, new distribution scheme. Now all the cartels are getting in on the action. They’re starting to compete with each other and looking for new markets. You can guess what their next target is.”
“But why reservations?” said Marie. “It’s not like we have a large population. Seems like they’d go somewhere with more people.”
“Rest of the market is saturated, at least out west. And it makes sense to expand to the reservations—lack of police presence. What are there, like fifty tribal police out where you guys are?”
“Not even that many,” I said.
“Problem is, the cartel doesn’t have people on the reservations,” he said. “They’ll stand out if they try to sell there themselves. So they’re starting to recruit local Native Americans for their cells—using gangs here in Denver who have connections out there.”
“Rick Crow,” I said.
“I can’t say anything about that. What I will say is, if we catch the reservation guys, the salespeople, we might get ’em to roll on the bosses. At least slow them down. These skells are like rats—they find a way to get in and shit all over everything.”
I went inside and got some water while I thought about what Dennis had said.
“All right, that’s the background,” Dennis said when I returned. “Let me ask again: You’re sure the transaction with your nephew went down on school grounds?”
“Yeah, he said they gave him the stuff by the football field,” I said. “Why does that matter?”
“Federal law states that selling narcotics within one thousand feet of a school brings a massive punishment. These guys are too smart to do that here. But if we caught ’em selling at the school on your reservation, might be able to force them to testify in exchange for a plea.”
I saw where this was going and didn’t like it.
“I’ll need to talk to your nephew,” he said. “We’ll get him to set up a buy, put a wire on him. He’ll get more stuff from these guys. At his school.”
DENNIS TRIED TO SELL me on the plan. He said that being a confidential informant—or CI, as he put it—was safe, that they never send CIs into dangerous situations, and that they’re observed and protected during the buy. He said the wire was very small, not as large as it looks on TV, and they could even use a cell phone if necessary. Then he tried to tell me that using Nathan was the best way to get at these guys, since he already knew the dealers. They’d trust him for another sale before they figured out to sell the drugs away from the school.
He said it was crucial to shut down these heroin pushers, that we’d be saving the lives of innocent people. He made it sound like the future of the rez, if not the nation itself, depended on my decision to wire Nathan up. Another positive, he said, was that getting rid of the drugs on the rez would prevent him from being tempted to use again.
“So what do you think?” Dennis said. “I can have my people out there by next week. We can talk to—Nathan, right?—get him set up, have this thing wrapped up pronto. It’s a win-win. We stop these guys from selling heroin on your turf. And no more kids using this shit, including your nephew.”
I pondered the offer. Contemplated it. For maybe a millisecond or two.
Fuck that.
“I can’t see letting him do this,” I said to Dennis. “Don’t want him involved.”
There was no way I’d let Nathan buy more drugs. I’d almost lost him once, and he needed to stay as far away from these assholes as possible. Not to mention that he’d be labeled a rat if word ever got out. Nobody liked a snitch, but Indians especially hated the feds, who’d never shown much interest in arresting criminals on the rez. Easier just to keep him out of the whole thing and handle it myself.
“Take my
card,” Dennis said. “Think it over. Talk with your boy. You know, I didn’t mention that we can sometimes pay CIs. Cash money. But I’ll need to hear from you fairly soon. That’s how this works. If you want to do the right thing.”
The right thing. I’d lost sight of that a long time ago.
12
We left the Mexican restaurant, a litter of empty soda bottles on our table. By now, it was getting dark, and the lights of the bars and restaurants flickered as we drove west on Colfax Avenue back to the motel. I saw a drunken man stumbling down the sidewalk wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed EMPTY SEATS IN CHURCH, MORE ROOM IN HEAVEN FOR ME!
“What do you think?” Marie said. She’d been pretty quiet during Dennis’s tirade.
“He’s crazy if he thinks I’d let Nathan wear a wire. No fucking way. Too dangerous.”
“But he said Nathan would be safe, they’d be watching him the whole time.”
I looked over at her. “You’re not suggesting I agree to this?”
“Well, he said this was the best way to stop the cartels—get at the bosses or whatever. They’re the bad guys. Maybe Rick could stay out of it.”
Again she was trying to protect Rick Crow. Jealousy blossomed in my gut like a bout of food poisoning. I said calmly, “Why is it so important to keep Rick out of it? If he’s working with them, he should go to jail too.”
“I’m just saying the important thing is to keep the drugs off the rez. Look, you know I’d never want Nathan to be in danger. But what happens if no one stops those guys? Maybe they keep selling, and he gets some of that stuff again.”
I glanced over at her and saw that her arms were folded across her chest, so that the top of her shirt puffed out. “Yeah, but I’m sure the cops can find somebody else to wire up. Doesn’t have to be him.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But it sounds like it’s not that easy to arrange these, uh, stings, or whatever they’re called. If it were, they’d have already shut them down.”
“Don’t know about that. I just know Nathan has been through enough. They can find another rat.”
“Rat? How is someone a rat if they’re doing a good thing? In my world, that person is a hero. You think Crazy Horse would be afraid to go after bad guys?”
“I don’t know what Crazy Horse would do,” I said. “Just know I’ll fight my own battles.”
It was funny that Marie—the sometimes-pacifist—was invoking Crazy Horse, the Lakota who vowed to fight the white men until his last breath.
“Nathan won’t wear a wire. He’s no snitch. That’s my decision—and it’s final.”
We rode in silence back to the motel.
THE NEXT MORNING, Marie was still mad at me. Maybe I’d been too stubborn, not willing to consider her views, but it was impossible for me to be neutral when it came to Nathan’s safety. Yes, he was my nephew, not my son, but Indians never made that distinction. Nieces, nephews, cousins—these were all viewed as family by Natives, not as lesser kin that could be ignored. Of course this sometimes led to some titanic battles between family members. I knew quite a few tiospaye on the rez where warring relations had refused to speak to each other for decades.
I waited for Marie to finish a phone call to her father. When she was done, we both needed caffeine, so we drove on Colfax Avenue until we found a place called La Capulina, which looked like a coffeehouse but might have been a bicycle repair shop, given that there were about fifteen bikes parked outside, the old-fashioned kind that didn’t have gears or brakes. Most of them had wicker baskets on the handlebars. These bicycles were cute, but would last about ten minutes on the pitted and scarred roads of the rez.
Inside, the coffeehouse resembled an abandoned factory, with bare metal walls and jagged fixtures, but strangely, a variety of objects were haphazardly scattered around the room: antique wheelchairs, battered birdcages, hand-stitched pillows, and dozens of old cameras—Polaroids, Honeywells, many I didn’t recognize. Behind the counter was a man in his mid-twenties with a full brown beard and long waxed mustache. He was dressed in old-fashioned mining garb, as if he’d just stepped out of a quarry in 1850s Appalachia, minus the dirt and grime. He said something to me, but it was hard to hear over the music playing in the background, which sounded like a car’s transmission seizing up. I moved closer to the counter, where it was marginally quieter.
“I said, what can I start for you?”
“Two large coffees, one black and one cream,” I replied.
“Today we’re brewing La Mestiza. These are washed beans from Guatemala, the terroir is Southern Huila, and the varietal is Caturra. If you’d like to read the cupping notes, I have them right here. It’s a light and clean body with the aroma of caramel popcorn and brown sugar. And I’m sorry, we don’t serve any milks with our coffee. We want you to experience the flavor and bouquet of the coffee, not of some hormone-infested animal product.”
“Uh, okay, fine.”
We waited about ten minutes for him to make the coffee, which involved grinding some coffee beans and setting up an oddly shaped funnel over a jug and then pouring one molecule at a time of boiling water into the funnel. The whole thing reminded me of chemistry class, nothing like the Indian brewing process of tossing some grounds into a coffeepot over a fire. I have to say, the coffee was pretty good, maybe even exceptional, nothing like the java they served at Big Bat’s in Pine Ridge. This was no small compliment, as Big Bat’s coffee was widely considered to be the best in a hundred miles. Of course, the fancy coffee had better be good, given that each cup cost roughly the price of a pound of Folger’s.
We took our coffees to the patio, being careful not to spill a single expensive drop.
“Hey,” Marie said, “I’m sorry if I gave you a hard time about Nathan. I just want the best—for him and the rez. But it’s your decision.”
I was relieved that Marie’d had a change of heart. Yesterday I’d wondered if she’d be so willing to send a young kid into a drug buy if it was her own child. But maybe that was unkind.
“Thanks,” I said. “You know I want those assholes behind bars, too.”
“I have an idea,” she said. “Let’s do something fun tonight, take a little break. I don’t know, go out to dinner or whatever. I have a few dollars.”
This morning was getting better.
“That sounds good. Where do you want to go? Get some steaks?”
She smiled. “I don’t know, maybe something kind of touristy? What is Denver known for?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “it’s changed a lot since I was here last.”
“Let me ask someone.” She turned to the small table next to ours. There were three white women and two strollers parked there. “So sorry to disturb you, but we’re not from here. Could we ask you a question?”
The woman sitting closest to our table looked us over. She was wearing an expensive-looking camping jacket. I felt out of place in my old denim jacket and boots.
“Sure, what’s up?” she said.
“We want to do something fun in Denver,” Marie said, “go someplace special or see something unique to Colorado. Maybe a local restaurant? Any ideas?”
The women conferred. I tried to listen in, but it was hard to make out what they were saying because of their accents. They looked to be about thirty or forty years old, but their voices were high and nasal, like twelve-year-old girls with a cold. They sounded like a gaggle of ducks quacking. The first woman turned back to us while the other two continued their discussion.
“Do you mind me asking, where are you from?” she said in a friendly way.
“Not at all,” said Marie. “We’re from South Dakota, just visiting for a few days.”
“Are you, ah, Native Americans?”
“Yes, we’re Sioux, from the Rosebud Reservation.”
I observed that Marie had code-switched, referring to our people as Sioux so as not to confuse the women. The French word sioux meant “little snakes,” and was rarely used by Lakota people. The other two women turn
ed back to us, having completed their discussion of Denver restaurants.
“We have the perfect spot for you! It’s been here forever, it’s kitschy and fun. Everybody goes there at least once; it’s like a restaurant and theme park. The food is meh, but you will have a great time, we promise! It’s called Casa Bonita.”
AS PROMISED, Casa Bonita was a weird blend of amusement park and Mexican food joint. The place was huge, with a giant pink bell tower standing in the middle of a parking lot. Inside, we were amazed to discover a thirty-foot-high waterfall and pool, cliff divers, strolling mariachi bands, puppet shows, and even a pirate cave. The hostess took pity on us and seated us away from the families with shrieking children. We were led up a series of stairs to a table near the top of the waterfall. The table was surrounded by fake palm trees and tiki torches, giving us some privacy and a close view of the divers. They appeared to be college kids, dressed up as bandits, pirates, and, yup, Indians. The divers would shout out the lines of their skits, which all seemed to revolve around good guys being chased by villains, before diving into the pool below. I was relieved to see that the bad guy was not a faux Indian but a person dressed up in a gorilla suit. After the divers made their jumps, the kids below us screamed their appreciation, and it was easy to get in the spirit of the place.
Our food came, and it was pretty far from the street tacos I’d had at Taco Mex. This was gringo fare masquerading as Mexican food, like a white man wearing a sombrero. Bland tacos, tasteless enchiladas, and mild refried beans. Three Coronas for Marie, a Coke for me. I’ll admit that the desserts were pretty good. At first I thought they’d brought us frybread, which surprised me, but the waiter told me these were sopapillas, or “little pillows” in English. Sweet fried dough, topped with powdered sugar and dipped in honey. They were lighter than Indian frybread, and, it pained me to admit, much better.
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