Which didn’t make pulling into the dirt parking lot of the community center any easier.
There was already a fire burning, with at least a dozen lawn chairs set around it. Around half were occupied. Other men stood near a silent powwow drum. Rez dogs sprawled in the dirt. All heads turned in his direction as he killed the engine and stepped out of the pickup.
Morago moved away from the group of standing men and walked toward him. He clasped Thomas’s forearms and gave them a squeeze. “One thing the People know,” Morago said, “is that in a time of need, they can always count on the men of the Corn Eyes Clan. Welcome, brother. Ohla.”
Thomas had spent half his life trying to figure out a way to get out of the rez, but at this moment, he didn’t know why. An unfamiliar pride filled him. He squared his shoulders and stood straighter.
Morago smiled and stepped back. “Come,” he said. “We have tea by the fire.”
Thomas knew all the men here, but tonight it seemed as though they looked at him differently. They smiled and clapped his back as he followed Morago to the fire. Charlie Green—related to Thomas’s mother through marriage to a cousin—sat in the closest lawn chair and handed him a metal cup. The scent of herbal tea wafted up from the warm liquid.
“Ohla, Thomas,” Charlie said.
Thomas nodded his thanks. “Ohla. It’s been a while.”
Charlie shrugged. He dug into his pocket and came up with a pack of cigarettes. Thomas didn’t smoke, but he accepted one anyway, bent down for the light Charlie offered and took a drag. He held the smoke in for a moment, then exhaled and offered the cigarette back to Charlie.
“A terrible business, this,” somebody behind him said.
It was William Strong Bow. Settled on William’s shoulders, superimposed over his own features, was the vague outline of a bighorn’s head. Thomas hadn’t realized the man was kin to Derek.
“It makes no sense,” Thomas agreed. “I’m sorry to hear about Derek.”
William just shook his head and stared at the ground.
Thomas took an empty chair beside Charlie and sipped his tea while Charlie smoked. One by one, the other men came to the fire and stood or sat around it, the firelight flickering on their faces. The only one who didn’t join them was Jerry Five Hawks, the deputy on duty from the rez’s tribal police. He stood by the community center, leaning against a wall of the building, arms folded across his chest. Thomas supposed he couldn’t appear to take sides, but it was good to know he was present in case of trouble.
There were none of the jokes and kidding around that usually accompanied a gathering on the rez. The men spoke quietly or kept their own counsel, as Morago did. The shaman stared into the flames, his thoughts unreadable. Thomas amused himself by searching each of the men for their animal aura. A few had them—he marked bighorn, bobcat, packrat, rattler, cactus wren—and some didn’t. The only one he couldn’t read was Morago’s.
After a while, Petey Jojoba took his chair over to the powwow drum. Petey was a weaver who lived down the road from Aggie White Horse’s place, but he was also a hoop dancer, storyteller and drummer. He knew over a hundred stories about the Kikimi trickster Jimmy Cholla—always a favourite around the fires—but tonight when Petey woke a soft heartbeat from the drum, he began to tell of the time Hummingbird tricked the magpie girls into giving him all of their collected treasures.
The men fell silent, nodding their heads as they listened. Like the rest, Thomas had heard this story before. He’d grown up on stories like this, first hearing them from Auntie and his mother. But tonight it felt as though he was hearing it for the first time. Tonight he could almost see the cocky hummingbird swaggering around with his pockets full of rings and trinkets.
He wasn’t sure what was different. He was older, so he should have found it harder to immerse himself so completely in its well-worn telling. Maybe it was the night, or the unusual company. Or just the situation. He had no idea. The only thing he knew for sure was that everyone here felt the same, listening to Petey’s voice and the soft heartbeat of his mallet tapping the big powwow drum. Even the dogs lay with ears twitching, their eyes open and fixed on Petey as he spoke.
And they weren’t alone, the men and dogs, Thomas realized. As the story unfolded he became aware of animals gathering at the edges of the parking lot, half hidden in the cacti and brush. Jackrabbits. A bobcat. A pair of owls. Innumerable mice and packrats. Many of the cacti seemed to be closer to the parking lot than they had been when he’d first arrived. All of them following the rise and fall of Petey’s voice.
Petey had just reached the part where the magpie girls were getting their revenge, when something disturbed the animals and they melted back into the brush. The dogs stood up, turning their muzzles to the west. The story stopped and Petey’s drum went still. His gaze followed those of the dogs. When Thomas looked himself, he saw headlights coming up the road from the highway.
“Who’s that?” Charlie said. “It seems too early for Sammy to be on the warpath.”
One of the other men nodded. “And Thomas has Reuben’s truck.”
The mystery was solved a few moments later when a Kikimi County Sheriff’s cruiser pulled into the parking lot followed by an unmarked car. The men by the fire had to shield their eyes against the glare of the headlights. The driver of the cruiser shut off his engine, but left the headlights on as he stepped out of his car.
Nobody got up from their chairs, but Jerry pushed away from the wall where he’d been leaning. He adjusted his holster and walked across the parking lot to meet the other police officer.
“Looks like Sammy called the cops on us,” William murmured. “Coward.”
The door of the unmarked car opened and a white man got out. Thomas didn’t recognize him, but he knew the deputy from the sheriff’s office. Bob Hernandez. He came into the trading post from time to time to talk to Reuben.
“Hey, Bob,” Jerry said to the deputy. “What brings you out this way tonight?”
Bob jerked a thumb behind him. “Mr. Higgins here says his daughter’s been kidnapped and that she’s being held here on the rez. You think anybody here knows anything about it?”
Thomas and the other men exchanged glances. This was serious.
“You have anything more to go on?” Jerry asked. “What she looks like? When she went missing?”
“Her name’s Sadie. She’s sixteen, white, dark-haired, about yay high.”
Bob put out a hand to indicate a girl of about five-two or three.
“How long has she been missing?” Jerry asked.
“Twenty-four hours or so.”
“Do you have a picture?”
“I’ll have the office email one to you.”
Jerry nodded. “Good. I’ll get the word out and see what we can find.”
“Appreciate it,” Bob said.
He started to turn away, but Higgins pushed forward.
“That’s it?” Higgins said.
Both officers simply looked at him.
“You’re just leaving?” Higgins went on. “My little girl could be in any kind of trouble. For all we know, they could have her all doped up and be whoring her out. Hell, they could’ve sold her to some wetbacks in Mexico by now. You need to be busting down doors, putting the fear of God into them.”
“Those are some pretty serious accusations, Mr. Higgins,” Bob said. “You really need to dial it down.”
That was the polite way to put it, Thomas thought. All around him he could feel the other men bristling.
“If you’re telling me I need to shut up,” Higgins said, “I’m telling you hell no.”
“What makes you think she’s on the rez?” Jerry asked.
Higgins rolled his eyes. “I saw some big Indian grab her and throw her in a white van. Where else would he go to?”
“Can you give us a description of the abductor?”
“What kind of question is that? He looked like you.” Higgins nodded to the fire. “He looked like those bucks. How t
he hell am I supposed to know the difference?”
“That’s enough,” Bob said.
“Enough of what? Higgins asked. “You need to start doing something.”
The deputy shook his head. “If you don’t shut up,” he told Higgins, “I’m going to cuff you and throw you in the back of my car.”
“You can’t talk to me like that. I pay taxes. The sheriff’s going to hear about this—don’t think he won’t. You should be getting the Bureau of Indian Affairs on this. You should have the FBI in here right now, going door-to-door. You need choppers in the air. Let these Indians know they can’t get away with shit like this.”
Bob took a step in the man’s direction and Higgins scuttled back out of reach.
“I’m sorry about this,” Bob told Jerry.
“I’ll tell you who’s going to be sorry,” Higgins began.
Before he could finish, the deputy had him up against the side of his car. It took him only a moment to cuff Higgins and put him in the back of the cruiser.
“What’re you going to do with him?” Jerry asked.
The deputy shrugged. “Damned if I know. There’s something hinky about this whole business, but Higgins strikes me as a guy who knows how to work the system. I don’t think this is going away in any kind of a hurry.”
“We’ll do what we can here,” Jerry assured him.
“I know you will. Okay if I leave his car here overnight? I’ll get somebody to come by and get it tomorrow.”
“Not a problem.”
The deputy moved Higgins’ car to the far end of the parking lot, then drove away in his own vehicle. Once they were gone, Jerry regarded the men by the fire. “You don’t know anything about this, right?”
He asked the men in general, but his gaze was on Morago. Everybody knew the dorm held a half-dozen or so undocumented kids from Mexico. Kids with no family to call their own. And Morago ran the dorm as well as the school.
“There’s no white girl in the dorm,” the shaman said. “Not a kidnapped girl or a runaway.”
“If that was my old man,” somebody said, “I’d pay somebody to take me away.”
The men chuckled.
Jerry nodded. “Maybe Petey could finish his story.”
He returned to his position by the community center, leaning against the wall. Petey glanced at Morago. When the shaman nodded, he woke the heartbeat on the powwow drum once again, the padded mallet tapping the big drum’s skin.
“Now where was I?” he said.
Thomas smiled. As though Petey didn’t know.
“The magpie girls were about to give Hummingbird the what for,” William said.
Petey smiled. “So they were.”
He went back to the story, but this time Thomas had trouble concentrating. He kept glancing at Morago. The shaman stared into the coals of the fire, just as he had before. It was as though the interruption had never happened and all he was interested in was hearing the end of Petey’s story. But Thomas had the sense Morago knew more about this missing girl than he’d admitted to Jerry.
He was pretty sure he didn’t want to know what Morago was up to. It wasn’t his business. It was breaking some serious laws. But the truth was, now that his curiosity had been woken, he couldn’t not find out.
The only thing he knew for certain was he’d probably regret it.
17
Steve
It doesn’t take us long to climb the slope to the clearing where the hunting lodge stands. We pause under the heavy boughs of the pines that grow at the edge of the forest, and study the building. The place is a lot bigger than I expected. Two floors, maybe fifteen hundred square feet per floor. There’s no road through the forest, only a trail. Parked on the lawn are half a dozen ATVs. I know they also fly ’copters up here, so I figure the helipad must be on the other side of the building, out of sight from our position.
“I don’t see any guards,” I say.
Calico punches me lightly on the bicep.
“What was that for?”
“Why would there be guards? This is a lodge. A fancy, fake-rustic hotel for mighty white hunters who like to take their prey down from a distance and then leave their bodies to rot where they fall. You think they’re worried about being robbed? With all their big guns? People only come up here on Sammy’s say-so.”
“Except for us.”
The grin she gives me is feral. “Except for us,” she says. “So what’s the plan? Are we going to have a conversation with Sammy, or do we just steal Derek’s head?”
“Where would they even keep something like that?”
“My guess? In a freezer. There’s probably one in the basement.”
I nod.
She gives me an expectant look. “So which is it going to be?”
“Why can’t it be both? I’ll go talk to Sammy while you steal the head.”
Her feral grin returns. Her hand strokes the part of my arm she punched just a moment ago.
“Now you’re talking,” she says. “I’ll come back and get you after I’m done. Try to stay out of trouble until then—or at least don’t start anything you can’t finish.”
“Since when did I ever—” I start, but she’s already gone, vanished from my sight and leaving only a soft whufft of displaced air behind.
I cross the lawn and aim for the big front door. I don’t bother to knock. This is like a hotel, right? I could be a guest. So I go straight inside and find myself standing in a huge room dominated in the middle by a stone fireplace that disappears into a high ceiling of pine tongue-and-groove. Large pieces of rustic furniture dot the area: chairs, sofas and end tables all clustered together in small islands. There’s a front desk to my right, with nobody behind it. To my left is a broad staircase going up to the second floor.
I think I’m alone until the quiet murmur of conversation draws my attention toward the far end of the room. A couple of white men are sitting in a far corner, legs up on the table between them, drinks in hand. They’re in their forties, short-haired and clean-shaven, slightly paunchy, outfitted in chinos and crisp flannel shirts that I doubt have ever been worn before this trip.
I’m debating whether to go over and ask them if they know where Sammy is, when I hear a footstep. Turning, I find Dave Running Dog is now on the other side of the counter.
“Can I help—” he starts, but then he recognizes me. “Ohla, Steve. What the hell brings you up here?”
“Maybe I’m thinking of taking up big game hunting.”
Dave laughs. “Oh yeah. Next you’ll be telling me Morago’s planning to drop by the casino to play the slots.”
“Could happen.”
“Sure. Soon as Sammy goes on a spirit quest.”
I smile, then say, “Actually, I’m here to see Sammy.”
Dave can’t hide his surprise. I guess it’s understandable. What’s an old desert rat like me got in common with a guy like Sammy? Dave probably thought I’d come up to see him.
I first met Dave a few years ago when I came across him on the narrow dirt track that runs from his mother’s place down to Zahra Road. His truck was broken down, his mama in the shotgun seat with what turned out to be appendicitis. Dave didn’t know the first thing about car engines, but mechanics had been a hobby of mine as a kid. I can’t do a damn thing with the new cars since they’re all fancy computers and crap now, but give me an old engine and I’m golden. I soon had that old truck of his running again and they got to the hospital in time.
After that, we’ve run into each other here and there, but I haven’t seen much of him since he started to work for Sammy. The two sides of the rez pretty much keep to themselves these days, and I’ve never had any reason to go to the casino side.
Dave looks at me like I’m a little nuts. “You came all the way up here to see him?”
One of the complaints from the traditional side about the casino is that it makes the people lazy. Anyone who comes over to this side drives. Used to be, folks didn’t think twice about walking f
rom one end of the rez to the other. They hunted, put in crops, looked after their sheep and goats. It was all about keeping their connection to the land. To them, the casino means easy money and a big disconnect from tradition.
“It’s about Derek Two Trees,” I say.
Dave has to think about that for a moment before he says, “I’m pretty sure Sammy doesn’t know him. Sammy doesn’t keep up with any of the old school traditional crowd.”
“That’s okay. Just tell me where he is,” I say.
Dave waits a beat, then nods and motions me to come around behind the counter. We walk down a short hall with doors on either side, and stop dead center at the end, in front of a carved, double wooden door depicting various desert animals. Dave knocks and somebody inside tells us to come in.
Sammy’s office is just what I expected. Big and rustic, like the rest of the lodge, but it’s also a power exec’s man cave. Native artifacts hang from the walls, including a full chief’s headdress, which is kind of funny since the Kikimi have never worn that kind of thing. A stuffed grizzly stands in the corner, and I find myself wondering if it was like Derek—both man and animal. A big flat screen on the wall and a laptop on his massive desk bring us right up to modern day technology.
Sammy Swift Grass is in his mid-thirties, a heavyset man with the broad features of the Kikimi, his long hair pulled back in a sleek ponytail. He wheels his leather chair back from his desk. I see he’s wearing a casino logo denim shirt with a fancy bolo tie and crisp chinos. A beaded belt with a big turquoise buckle completes the look.
He gives me a once over, then turns to Dave with a raised questioning eyebrow.
“This is Steve,” Dave explains. “Steve Cole. Says he want to talk to you about Derek Two Trees.”
“I don’t know any Derek Two Trees.”
“That’s what I told him.”
Sammy finally addresses me directly. “What’s this about, Mr. Cole?”
“One of your clients shot Derek this afternoon,” I tell him. “People on the other side of the rez are upset.”
The Wind in His Heart Page 10