by Thomas King
At eight-thirty, everyone began to get restless, especially the news teams who Thumps suspected were on a schedule. At a quarter to nine, the networks pinned Archie and demanded, in their noisy, unctuous way, to know what was happening. Archie smiled and assured them that everything was running a little late.
Thumps found Dakota in the balcony.
“He’s supposed to be here,” said Dakota, answering the question before Thumps could ask it.
“Didn’t he come with you?”
Dakota shook her head. “He wanted to rest. Said he’d meet me here.”
“Trouble?” Hockney was standing by the staircase.
“He’s a little late,” said Thumps.
“What you mean,” said the sheriff, “is that he’s not here.”
Dakota began pulling at the skin around her fingers. “This is wrong.”
Hockney was shifting from one foot to the other and leaning in the general direction of the front door.
“We’ll check it out,” Thumps told Dakota.
“I want to come.”
Thumps shook his head. “No,” he said. “Stay here. In case he shows and all this is just part of the game.”
THE JOG FROM the church to the Tucker was cold and brisk. Thumps always made the mistake of thinking that because Hockney was big and old and out of shape, the man couldn’t move. The chances were good that Noah was fine. The beating might have been worse than it looked, but more than likely he had simply fallen asleep and slept through the reading.
The sheriff didn’t waste any effort. He showed the desk clerk his badge, and two minutes later, Hockney was sliding the card key into the lock and pushing his way into the room without so much as a hello.
“Shit!” Duke loosened his tie and broke his neck out of jail. “Nobody touch anything.”
Noah had not fallen asleep. From the looks of the room, nobody had got any sleep. Several chairs had been overturned. The sofa had been shoved to one side, taking the rug with it. The smell of blood was everywhere, along with the lingering scent of gunfire. Thumps stood by the doorway and watched Hockney move through the living room slowly, like a bear stalking game.
“Just great.”
“We got a problem?” Special Agent Asah had magically appeared at Thumps’s shoulder.
Thumps shrugged. “You guys are the professionals.”
Hockney turned to Asah. “Thumps used to be a cop. Did I tell you that?”
“Thought you hired him as a deputy.”
“That I did,” said Hockney.
“Where’s the body?” Asah squatted down next to a large dark stain. “Nobody loses this much blood and walks away.”
“That’s not much help,” said the sheriff, letting the frustration of having to wear a suit and tie show. “Andy could have figured out that much.”
Maybe so, thought Thumps, but if the parking lot at the Holiday Inn had been any larger, Andy might still be walking around in the snow, looking for Street’s car.
“So, what do you two geniuses make of this?”
It was a rhetorical question, and Thumps knew better than to offer an opinion.
“Hard to tell,” said Asah.
Smart, thought Thumps. Let Hockney do all the work and save your head from being taken off at the shoulders.
“They teach you that at FBI school?” Hockney jerked his cellphone off his belt. “This is Sheriff Hockney,” he barked. “Put me through to Emergency.”
“Okay.” Asah turned to Thumps. “Ridge is in the room alone, and someone knocks on the door.”
“Someone he knows.”
“Maybe,” said Asah. “The two of them come into the room, and for whatever reason, Ridge gets shot.”
“Then where is he?”
“He gets up,” said Asah, trying to pretend that he believed this scenario. “And then he leaves.”
“And goes where?”
“Well, not to the hospital,” said Hockney, joining the conversation. “Nobody has checked in there all evening. And that little piece of fiction you two were working up doesn’t explain the drag marks.”
“Nope,” agreed Asah. “It doesn’t.”
“Okay,” said Thumps, “someone comes in and shoots Ridge and then drags him away.”
“You’re beginning to piss me off, DreadfulWater.”
“But that’s not what happened.” Thumps was surprised to hear his voice saying what his mind was thinking.
“No, it’s not,” said the sheriff. “Maybe Mr. Ridge had company. Maybe he got shot. But there weren’t two people in this room. There were three.”
Asah looked at Hockney.
“He’s right,” said Thumps. “There are three sets of footprints.”
The sheriff gestured to the blood near the sofa. “One set there and one set by the rug. But this set by the door. These prints are different from the first two.”
Asah walked the room. “So, you think that Mr. A shot Mr. B and then was carried off by Mr. C.”
Crude, thought Thumps, but accurate.
Everyone was getting ready for round two when Hockney suddenly stopped and raised a hand. “What’s that?”
Asah moved to the arched window and looked out. “Oh, you’re going to love this,” he said.
The network people with their cameras and tape recorders had evidently got tired of waiting and were coming down the street toward the Tucker like a herd on the run. Somehow they had smelled the blood in the air.
“Great.” Duke flipped his phone open and tried to destroy the tiny keypad with his finger. “Andy,” he bellowed into the phone, “haul your butt over to the Tucker. Seal the place off, and shoot any reporter who gets in your way.”
Asah was smiling and shaking his head, but then Chinook wasn’t his town. It was going to take Hockney a very long time to dig himself out of this mess, and Thumps suspected that if the sheriff found Noah Ridge alive, he’d probably shoot the man himself.
“Talk to your lady friend,” said Hockney, his voice low and controlled. “She knows more than she’s telling.”
“Where you going to be?”
“After the reading,” said the sheriff, “my wife and I were going to go out to dinner. At that fancy Italian place south of town. But instead, Andy and I are going to fingerprint this room, search for clues, and talk with our good friends in the press.”
“Can I watch?”
“What’d I say about pissing me off?”
Thumps looked at the lamp on the floor and the blood stains on the shade. “You think someone grabbed him?”
“Then why shoot him?” said the sheriff. “Besides, you know anyone who would pay his ransom?”
As he walked down the hall to the elevators, Thumps reasoned that there were any number of people whom Noah had annoyed over the years who might like to see him inconvenienced, even dead, but he couldn’t think of many who would go to the effort of kidnapping the man, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would pay the ransom.
NINETEEN
Thumps caught Dakota as she was stepping off the elevator.
“Where’s Noah?”
“The press is right behind you.” Thumps hurried Dakota down the hall toward the red Exit sign. “You want to talk to them?”
“No.”
“Then let’s get out of here.”
“What about Noah?”
By now the hotel would be filling up with news people waiting for the elevators to take them to Noah’s room and Sheriff Duke Hockney. Thumps knew that if he tried to take Dakota through the lobby, she would be swarmed. The only hope was if the stairs went all the way to the parking garage.
They did.
The Volvo actually seemed happy to see him, or maybe it was just happy to have been parked somewhere under a roof.
“Damn it! Where’s Noah?”
Thumps eased the car past the television trucks, slipping and sliding on the ice like a frozen turkey on a hockey rink. Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would change the tires.
&nbs
p; FREEWAY COULD SMELL COMPANY a mile down the road and was waiting for Dakota at the front door.
“Is she yours?”
Thumps put the water on before he took off his jacket. “No,” he said, “she just lets me live here.”
Freeway led Dakota to the sofa and settled in her lap.
“She’s friendly.”
“No, she’s not.”
As Thumps waited for the water to boil, he tried to make sense of how the day had gone so far. Noah is attacked on his morning jog and winds up in the hospital. He goes back to the hotel, lies down to rest, and disappears.
“Noah’s room had been roughed up.” Thumps took a deep breath. “And there was blood.”
Dakota stopped petting the cat. “Noah?”
“No sign of him.” The tea kettle began to whistle. Thumps dropped the tea bags into the pot and poured the boiling water over them. “Would he run?”
“From what?” said Dakota. “With all that publicity waiting for him at the church?”
“The book wasn’t doing so well.”
“It was just slow.” Dakota wasn’t going to give up easily. “But it was catching on.”
“Publishing house didn’t think so,” said Thumps. “They didn’t send Noah on this tour. He sent himself. His idea. RPM money.”
Freeway rolled over on Dakota’s lap and stretched. She was willing to put up with boring conversations so long as someone continued to pet her.
“RPM doesn’t have any money.” Dakota ran a hand along Freeway’s belly. “Noah couldn’t send himself anywhere.”
“Then who’s paying for the tour?”
“Look around,” said Dakota. “Who else is there?”
The only tea Thumps had left was an organic white tea that he had bought in Alberta. It was supposed to be high in antioxidants. He wasn’t exactly sure what antioxidants were or what they did, but right now he could use something that made him smarter.
“You?”
“My parents. They weren’t wealthy, but they made good investments.”
“And you’ve been giving their money to Noah?”
“Not to Noah,” snapped Dakota. “To the movement. To the cause.”
“You think he’s worth it.”
Dakota came off the sofa in a flash, sending Freeway sprawling. “What the hell would you know about worth?”
Thumps was sorry he had started this, but now that he had, he wasn’t about to retreat. “He’s an egotistical asshole.”
“Yeah,” said Dakota, “he is. He also puts his egotistical asshole on the line. Remember when the army wanted to build a test facility for nuclear-waste storage on the Ute reservation? That was Noah who stood in front of the bulldozers, and it was Noah who went to jail.”
Thumps did remember the blockade. RPM had organized the protest, and Noah had stood in front of the dozers. Along with about a hundred other people. And he had gone to jail. But he was bailed out almost immediately. The other people hadn’t been so lucky. They stayed in jail until the case was thrown out of court.
“And the survival schools? Noah set those up for our kids, who thought being Indian was the same thing as being shit.”
Noah had raised the money, all right. Foundations, government agencies, corporations, private individuals. He had criss-crossed the country, shaking hands, flattering egos, making speeches. But he hadn’t run the schools. He hadn’t taught the kids. He hadn’t sat down and helped the families deal with the joys of poverty.
Thumps could feel the anger rising. “He wasn’t the only one. There were other people who did the real work.”
“That’s right,” said Dakota, her voice hard. “He only made it all happen. What the hell did you do?”
“This isn’t about me.”
“No,” said Dakota. “It’s not.”
The tea was ready now, but Thumps was pretty sure it was going to stay in the pot.
“Nobody cares anymore. Nobody remembers. Most of those programs we started are gone now. Most of the gains we made have been lost. You know what it means to spend your life trying to make a difference, only to discover no one cares?”
“I’ll find Noah if I can.”
“Why?”
“Because you believe in him.”
“But you don’t.”
No, thought Thumps, I don’t. But Dakota was right. He hadn’t done much. A couple of marches. A sit-in or two. Lots of indignation. Not much action. Always in the shadows. Always out of harm’s way.
“I need to know something.”
“What?”
“I need to know who chose the towns.”
“Why?”
“Jesus, Dakota, you want my help or not?”
“Noah.” The flash was gone from Dakota’s eyes, but the anger remained in her voice. “Noah chose the towns.”
“So, why Chinook?”
“Lucy was from here.” Dakota sat in the chair, her hands in her lap. “At the reading, Noah was going to announce the creation of a scholarship in her name.”
There was value in that, Thumps supposed. Noah Ridge coming to Chinook to make peace with the past, to bury the ghosts. But it didn’t sound like the Noah Ridge that Thumps knew. That Noah was an Old Testament god. If Lucy had been an FBI informant, why, after all these years, would he honour her memory? Especially in such a public way.
“What about Lucy and the FBI?”
“Noah’s wrong about that,” said Dakota quickly. “He’s always been wrong about that.”
Thumps was getting slow. He should have seen it sooner.
“It wasn’t Noah’s idea. It was yours.”
“What difference does it make?”
“And your money.”
“No,” said Dakota, “that’s gone. There’s nothing left but the book. The book was going to pay for everything.”
“But without Noah?” Thumps let the question hang in the air.
Dakota didn’t have to answer that question. Without Noah to give it a face, the book had little chance of garnering a national audience, the kind of audience it would need to bring in enough money and attention for RPM to survive. That’s what the book tour was about. Survival.
And in that regard, Thumps suddenly realized, a dead Noah might just be more valuable than a live Noah. The media loved blood and mystery, mayhem and intrigue. A second murder would send them into a feeding frenzy.
“I want to go back to the hotel.” Dakota put her coat on. “You haven’t told me everything, have you?”
“For what it’s worth,” said Thumps, “I don’t think he’s dead.”
“But you don’t care.”
“I care about you.”
“You don’t know me.” Dakota pulled her coat around herself and turned up the collar. “You just know who you’d like me to be.”
THE LOBBY OF the Tucker was alive with activity. Through the windows, Thumps could see correspondents milling around, talking to each other and to their cameras. He was sure that Hockney was, somewhere in the middle of the herd, grumpy about all the nonsense, grumpy that he had had to button his collar and fix his tie.
Dakota didn’t get out right away. “No point in coming in.”
“If you need me to, I will.”
“I need you to find Noah.”
The windows of the Tucker were ablaze with lights. Outside, by the network vans, people were running back and forth, shouting to each other, their breath pouring out of their mouths like smoke, and for a moment, as Dakota ascended the stairs to the main entrance, it looked as though she was walking into a house on fire.
TWENTY
Thumps never expected the nightmares, but that didn’t keep them from coming. After all these years, he would have thought that they would have lost some of their power. But this was not the case. And when they did arrive, they arrived in force. Always the same. Always terrifying. Always with Anna and Callie lying on the beach. On those nights, he would wake up shouting and come up from the depths of sleep swinging. And in the morning, the she
ets would be soaked in sweat and his muscles cramped and aching.
When Thumps woke, he imagined that the phone was ringing or that someone was knocking on the door. But the house was silent. Thumps looked at the clock. Nine. Much too late to be in bed. Dakota probably hadn’t got any sleep. The sheriff would certainly be up by now. So would Asah.
And the television folk? They might be up, but somehow Thumps doubted it.
Last night should have been the end of it. Ridge should have given his reading and left town. Thumps and Dakota should have had a quiet dinner, talked about old times, and left it at that. Or he and Claire should have had a quiet dinner, talked about anything but Stick, and left it at that.
All those “shoulds.” Any one of them would have done just fine. Instead, Ridge disappears, Dakota sends him packing, and Claire . . . what had happened to Claire? Thumps pulled himself up to a sitting position and found the phone.
“Sheriff’s office.”
Hockney sounded murderous. For a moment, Thumps thought about just hanging up and going back to bed.
“Any luck?”
“Where are you?”
“In bed.”
“I’m not paying you to be in bed.”
“So, I’m still a cop.”
“You are, until I say you’re not.”
Thumps was thinking of something clever to say when he realized that, once again, the sheriff had hung up on him. So, nothing new had happened overnight. Street was still dead, Ridge was still missing, and Hockney still needed a suit that fit.
Thumps wondered if Asah had developed a flow chart yet that listed the various characters and their relationships to each other, along with the appropriate dates and times. And a map with pins in it. It was something that the FBI were fond of doing. They had done that in Northern California for the Obsidian Murders, had even developed a series of profiles, psychological fictions that tried to imagine aspects of the killer—age, race, class, education. Thumps still had all of it, the charts, the maps, the profiles, all packed away in boxes in the basement. He should have thrown them out long ago, but the cop in him couldn’t do it.
There was nothing wrong in all of this plotting and guessing. The database that the bureau had amassed over the years had turned guessing into a science of sorts. But in California, it hadn’t helped. Even though each murder had been a meticulously constructed diorama, the bodies left on a beach, arranged in the sand just beyond the high-tide mark, neither the FBI nor the state police could find a common link, a common thread. The victims had been both men and women, young and old. A few had been from the area. Most of them were tourists or had come up from the city to visit friends. Ten victims in all, each with a small piece of obsidian in their mouths.