“Sorry we had to rearrange the furniture,” Lopez said. “The carpet had blood stains and we replaced the mattresses and bedding.”
“Otherwise, it looks no different,” Quin said.
“There’s food in the fridge.”
“Thanks.” He didn’t feel hungry.
“You look kind of shaken up,” she said. “You want company tonight?”
“No, I’ll be fine. I’ve got friends stopping by in a couple of days.”
“At least let me buy you dinner in town tonight,” she said. “We’ll talk about the case before you get started. There are a few things you need to know.”
For the next hour and a half, Candace drove with Hawk seated up front and Jimmy resting on the seat behind them. As they entered Custer State Park, they discussed the Paha Sapa, the Lakota word for the Black Hills. Hawk was eager to climb Hinhan Kaga Paha, or what was known as Harney Peak, the highest summit east of the Rocky Mountains at 7,200 feet.
“You sure you can climb that high?” she asked him.
“Black Elk climbed it when he was only nine years old,” Hawk said. “I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again today.”
“Who is Black Elk?”
“A shaman,” Hawk said. “One who had a great vision on Hinhan Kaga Paha.”
“What was the vision?”
“He was taken into the clouds and shown how the world really is,” Hawk explained, “how we are all interconnected like a great hoop.”
“Like the medicine wheel,” Jimmy said from the back seat.
“Medicine wheel?”
“A circle that connects all things; north, south, east and west,” Hawk said. “Tribes have their own interpretations of it, but each direction has its own philosophy, animal, and color. East is the beginning because the sun rises from the east. Its color is gold. The animal is the golden eagle, who sees the world as it is, without illusion. South is green; its animal is the mouse that is curious, ever exploring. West is black, where we see the setting sun, and it’s the hibernating bear, where one goes for reflection. North is winter; its color is white and its animals are the wolf and the buffalo, who represent intelligence and insight that comes later in life.”
He was describing the interconnected nature of all things. Candace once had a class in World Religions where she learned that Hinduism has a mandala, a circle with four colored gates. And of course, in Chinese philosophy the yin and yang incorporates a circle of black and white, representing opposing and complementary forces. “It’s a beautiful concept.”
“All directions meet at the center,” Jimmy added. “If you live a balanced life, you live in the center.”
“In Quin’s Navajo nation, they believe a criminal isn’t bad or evil, but somebody who is sick and out of balance,” Hawk said.
She wondered what Quin thought of Ben Moretti, a man accused of murdering people for money. That would certainly be a life out of balance, a very sick person.
“When we pulling over?” Jimmy asked,
“First we stop at the Crazy Horse Memorial,” Hawk said. “We’ll rent a cabin at Sylvan Lake tonight. It’s at the base of Hinhan Kaga Paha.”
“This is tourist season,” Jimmy said. “Did you make a reservation?”
“Nope.”
“How do you know we’ll get a room?”
“Got a feeling we will.”
“He always gets a feeling,” Jimmy said to her.
“Call the lodge if it makes you feel better,” Hawk said.
“Oh, now you’re okay with me using my phone?” Jimmy laughed.
“You’re a wise ass when you haven’t eaten,” Hawk replied.
They were a perfect fit for each other, old Hawk with his grandson, a man of wisdom and a young man of the digital age. They knew each other’s hot buttons, yet they respected their boundaries as well. She drove along a highway bordered by pine trees, many of them a dead gray. All it would take would be one cigarette to set the entire mountain ablaze. As they climbed a hill, she saw the carving of Crazy Horse jutting out of the rock, his face in profile, his long arm pointing to the horizon. She had seen it in photographs, but it was far more spectacular in person as they drove up to the entrance to pay the park fee. Hawk gave her money and she handed it to a teenager with spiked black hair. Hawk said something in Lakota and the young man nodded as they drove forward into a full parking lot.
“He’s Oglala,” Hawk said. “They run this exhibit.”
“Are there security cameras here that we should be concerned about, Hawk?” Jimmy asked.
“Any cameras they have here belong to the Oglala, not the feds.”
She parked the truck and stepped out onto the hot pavement, stretching her stiff muscles. Most of the people in the lot were tourists—families with children, grandparents, and couples on motorcycles arriving to see Crazy Horse.
“How close can we get?” she asked Hawk.
“I dunno, never been here before. I’ve always seen it from the road.”
They followed tourists to a visitors’ center that had a movie theater, a gift shop, and displays of tribal art. Hawk immediately recognized a gentleman he knew and walked over to him with Jimmy. Candace, on the other hand, wandered into the theater and sat in the cool darkness with other tourists to watch a movie about the making of the Crazy Horse Memorial.
Korczak Ziolkowski, a sculptor who’d worked briefly on Mount Rushmore, had received a letter from Chief Henry Standing Bear asking for assistance in creating a memorial to honor the traditions of North American Indians. The letter stated: “My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, too.” Ziolkowski was inspired by the tribe’s vision for the project and he understood why the Oglala, one of the last tribes corralled onto reservations by the United States Calvary, needed to carve their image onto the American landscape.
It was destined to be the largest man-made sculpture in the world. All four of the sixty-foot-tall presidential heads of Mount Rushmore could fit inside the head of the Crazy Horse monument. It is larger than the pyramids of Giza and it stands proudly like America’s version of the Sphinx. Ziolkowski died in 1982, but most of his ten children are still working on it, a project that is privately funded. The Oglala have been offered government funding to finish the memorial, but the tribe has refused to accept it. They had already learned that lesson; whenever they accepted money from the government, it came at a steep price. This time they were doing it at their own pace, in their own way. And Crazy Horse points across the Paha Sapa, reminding everyone that he once declared, “My lands are where my dead lie buried.”
After the short video, she followed the other tourists out of the theater into the visitors’ center, carrying the guilt and burden of history on her shoulders. Why did westward expansion have to be so hard on indigenous people? And what could be done about it today?
She found Jimmy and Hawk talking near the gift shop. “This place is amazing,” she said respectfully.
“Not everyone thinks so,” Hawk said. “The family of Crazy Horse never wanted this.” He pointed at the trinkets in the shop, the images of Crazy Horse on t-shirts.
“He never allowed his photo to be taken,” Jimmy said. “Now people take pictures of this Crazy Horse and post them online, every day.”
“What do you two think of that?”
“Can’t stop it now,” Hawk said. “It’s the spirit of Crazy Horse that’s important.”
He left the gift shop, so she and Jimmy joined him outside on an observation deck with a clear view of the memorial in the background. Hawk stopped at the edge of the deck and leaned on the railing.
“Who was Crazy Horse?”
“A cousin to Black Elk,” Hawk said.
“The shaman with the visions on Hinhan Kaga Paha?”
“Yes.”
“Crazy Horse was a great warrior,” Jimmy said. Together they explained how Crazy Horse had led the Lakota in wars with tribes such as the Crow, Shoshone, Arikara, Black
feet, and Pawnee before uniting with enemies to fight the US Calvary across the Great Plains. Because of his bravery and ability to unite the tribes in 1865, Crazy Horse became known as Ogle Tanka Un, Shirt Wearer or War Leader.
“He was a spiritual leader, too,” Hawk said. “He had visions at Lake Sylvan.”
“Isn’t that where we’re staying tonight?” she asked.
“Yep. In his vision he traveled south into the spirit world, where he received a medicine bundle to protect him, and where he was shown his war paint markings for battle: a yellow lightning bolt on his left cheek and white powder, like hailstones, on his body.”
Hawk went on to say that despite Crazy Horse’s success in battle, the warrior couldn’t turn the tide and the oncoming waves of soldiers who killed most of the buffalo and effectively starved the tribes, forcing them to live on reservations. And at Fort Robinson in 1877, during a scuffle and an exchange of misunderstood words, a soldier stabbed Crazy Horse with a bayonet, killing the Lakota War Leader.
Behind Hawk and Jimmy, the statue of Crazy Horse shone white in the sun. Candace imagined the war paint on his face and skin, and how this heroic leader had united warring tribes in a shared struggle to preserve their way of life.
“Quin has the spirit of Crazy Horse. That’s why I believe him,” Hawk said.
“The spirit of Crazy Horse?”
“Quin is a great warrior, wild, with a fighting spirit,” Hawk said. “A time is coming when we’ll need to defend our homeland again, all of us together. It’s people like Quin who will lead the way.”
A gust of wind rose up, carrying Hawk’s words across to the monument as Candace felt a shiver, the hair on her arms prickling. While terrorism wasn’t new to this part of the world, she sensed that Hawk was bracing for something bigger than the tragedy of 9/11. That must be why Homeland Security had mounted cameras at places like the Corn Palace and Mount Rushmore. What intrigued her even more was the FBI’s interest in psychic gifts like wind walking. Were they once again relying on Native Americans in a new world war?
Dinner conversation with Agent Lopez was more of a rattling monologue. Quin drank his home-brewed tea and ate tacos while listening to her. She had opinions about everything from the drug trade in Nogales to the lack of napkins at their wobbly table in the Border Line Bar, her favorite after-hours watering hole. All Quin had to do was feed her a question and she was off talking again, her burrito getting colder by the minute. He actually liked her, though, because Lopez was a bubbling font of knowledge about the Phoenix bureau and its gossip.
“A lot of agents talk about your division these days,” she said, cutting her burrito with a fork and knife.
“Because of the paranormal aspect?”
“Well, that’s certainly part of it,” she said. “But some agents are suspicious of you, Quin. They think you know what happened to your family. They say you and Autumn conspired to murder your parents, but I don’t think so. There’s no motive; your mom and dad were dirt-poor, with no life insurance or assets for you and Autumn to share. And if you had committed the perfect crime and got away with it, why return now? What I’ve learned over the years is that life is messy, and sometimes you can’t trust even your own family members. I bet you don’t know what happened to your family, but you’re wondering if Autumn knows. You think she’s alive and she knows why all that happened.”
She was good. Quin realized he had underestimated Agent Lopez. “Doesn’t bother you that I’m here on your turf?”
“Not a bit,” she said. “Why wouldn’t the bureau let you assist in the search for your own sister? Makes sense. Where you gonna start?”
“Wherever my team points me.”
“I hope you brought your passport.”
“You think the men who took my sister crossed the border?” The bureau had dropped that theory early on, searching instead near Tucson and Phoenix.
Chewing a piece of burrito, she said, “Tunnels.”
“Tunnels?”
“Underground roadways all over this place,” she said. “Mules transporting drugs, money, and people back and forth, under our feet. One tunnel is the length of three football fields and they use battery-powered golf carts to carry their supplies. Smart, huh?”
He knew of small tunnels under the border fencing that people would use to crawl under to get to freedom. His father had talked about them often, how easy it was to cross back and forth. But the idea that there was a labyrinth that large surprised Quin. “When did the bureau discover them?”
“Not the bureau, the DEA. Pissed off the bureau agents. The DEA guys got such egos.”
“How long ago?” he asked again.
“Three years.”
“How long would it take to dig those tunnels?”
“Some of them have been there for ten or fifteen years.”
“So it’s possible that whoever grabbed Autumn fled through one of the tunnels.”
She nodded, chewing. “If they did, they went south. All the tunnels end just outside of Nogales on the Mexico side.”
“The men who grabbed Autumn spoke good Spanish, too,” Quin said, remembering their haunting, barking cheers as they chased his sister. “Why didn’t the bureau focus their efforts across the border to search for her?”
“A lack of resources and a change in priorities,” she said. “The new Office of Homeland Security changed everyone’s workload. We focused on terrorists, not a girl who might be a runaway.”
“She wasn’t a runaway.”
“Then somebody murdered your parents, cut you up pretty good, and kidnapped your sister. Who hated your parents that much?”
“I told investigators I didn’t know. It was their job to figure it out and they let the case go cold.”
“Autumn and those men weren’t terrorists,” Lopez said. “Our new priority at that time was battling the drug cartels. Now it’s the jihadists.”
“And that’s still the priority,” he said. “This is nothing but a practice mission. Agent Kruse has his sights set on chasing terrorists.”
“In the good old days we contained organized crime,” she said. “Today it’s like the wild, Wild West. Every country has its specialty; China and Russia are hackers, in the Middle East you got religious zealots, and south of the border the cartels pump drugs into the USA like Americans are on an IV drip.”
“Can you show me one of those tunnels?”
“Sure, there’s one right by the house. I’ll show you in the morning.”
“Why wait for daylight? We’re going underground and I’ve got plenty of flashlights. Let’s go now.”
Agent Lopez parked the truck in the driveway and Quin ran inside to fetch two flashlights and a GPS. Back outside, she was standing in the yard smoking, checking messages on her phone.
He shined a light on her. “Those smokes will kill you.”
“I’d quit but you know what they say, nobody likes a quitter,” she said, stepping out of the light, walking into the dark desert.
“What about the truck?”
“Leave it, we can walk to the tunnel. I told you it was close to here. Why do you think we bought your old house?”
They walked side by side, each of them holding a flashlight toward the ground in front of them. When Quin was a boy he never went out into the desert at night. His parents warned him and his sister of bandits, deadly snakes, and scorpions. Whenever Quin questioned these warnings, his father would tell them stories of an even more frightening beast, the chupacabra, a wild animal that feeds off the blood of goats. And when Quin reminded his father that there were no goats near their home, he would say, “There are young boys and girls who taste every bit as good. Stay inside.” They did as they were told, except for the night Autumn climbed out their bedroom window into the hands of wild men who might as well have been living chupacabras.
Lopez swung her light toward an object in the sand. “We’re close.”
“Car battery?”
“Golf cart battery. Battery-powe
red golf carts transport people and drugs faster without asphyxiating everyone in the tunnels.”
Candace helped Hawk and Jimmy unload bags from the truck, carrying the gear into a log cabin above Lake Sylvan. This was tourist season, yet somehow Hawk had secured a cabin without any prior reservations.
“You got lucky this time, Papa.” Jimmy tossed the bags onto one of the two queen beds.
“Not luck. I’ve got intuition.” Hawk turned to Candace. “You ready for a hike?”
“I suppose I could stretch my legs. Where to?”
“To the top of Hinhan Kaga Paha.”
“How far a climb is that?”
“A couple hours each way,” Jimmy said, collapsing onto the bed. “If we do it we’ll be up half the night, and we’ve got to get up early to make it through Arizona tomorrow. Forget it.”
Through the dusty windowpanes she saw the late-afternoon sun illuminating the pine trees in a wash of yellow light. They’d have to leave soon if they wanted any daylight on the walk down. “I’m up for it if you are, Hawk.”
“Good. Jimmy, get up and pack a ceremonial bag.”
He did as his grandfather told him, quietly unpacking one bag into a smaller one.
“Should I bring anything?” she asked.
“Hiking boots, a jacket, and an open mind.”
They hiked a stone path along Lake Sylvan where a group of children splashed in the water, their voices echoing off the rock walls on the north side. From the lake, Hinhan Kaga Paha didn’t look challenging to her; it seemed more like a pine-covered bluff. But as they walked the trail, she realized that was just a foothill blocking her view of the real journey in front of them.
Hawk led the way with Jimmy right behind him, traversing a series of rocky switchbacks along the mountainside. The higher they climbed, the more tree stumps and boulders she tripped on, yet her guides seemed to glide over the ground without losing their footing. She wondered how an old man could out-hike her on this mountain. After forty minutes of climbing, the men waited for her at the top of a steep trail, talking to one another under their breath.
In The Company of Wolves_Follow The Raven Page 10