That worried him. Dear Lord, the worry sat like an ingot in his stomach. If her theory was right, then the man running the casino, Stan Lexson, had something to hide. Something important enough to pay off the tribal gaming chairman with choice jobs.
Father John thumped the steering wheel with one fist and tried to recall what he’d read about Indian casinos. How tribes hired management companies. How some of the companies had turned out to be fronts for organized crime, and how the companies had skimmed profits from the casinos and stolen from the tribes. The managers had gone to prison.
That was the point, he told himself. Indian casinos were old business now, more than three hundred operating around the country. Surely the Indian Gaming Commission had safeguards in place to prevent criminals from taking over. Surely the Arapaho Business Council had investigated Lodestar Enterprises and Stan Lexson before they entered into an agreement. It was logical.
He felt reassured; logic was reassuring. Vicky had said herself that she didn’t have any evidence. Only a theory, and the fact that Lexson wouldn’t let her see the personnel records. And yet . . . Monroe had the same theory, and the man had tried to close down other Indian casinos. Is that why he was suspicious? Because he’d seen the way management companies could operate?
Father John was only half aware of the curve ahead and the sky, clear blue and shot through with clouds, dipping toward the road. There was no telling what Vicky might do to prove the theory. He felt helpless with the realization that he couldn’t protect her, he couldn’t keep her from danger.
He took the curve, pulled into the parking lot in front of the senior center, and slid to a stop, gravel spitting from beneath the tires. He turned everything off—engine, tape player—threaded his way past the pickups and old sedans that were parked around the lot in no particular order and let himself into the center. Coffee and tobacco odors wafted toward him. Seated around the metal tables were groups of elders, cowboy hats pushed back on their heads, bolo ties dangling around the opened collars of their plaid shirts.
“Hey, Father!” somebody called through the hum of conversations.
Father John made his way around the tables, shaking hands, exchanging pleasantries, patting shoulders knobby from arthritis and decades of lassoing horses and digging fence post holes. Finally, he helped himself to a mug of coffee at the counter, then walked over to the table near the window that framed a view of the foothills. He sat down across from Will Standing Bear whose rail-thin body was folded onto a metal chair. The old man gripped the armrest with one hand and moved his coffee mug up and down the table with the other. James Yellow Horse sat at one end, an ancient-looking man with thin gray hair and a beaked nose. At the other end was Dan Utica, the youngest of the three, black hair hanging in thick braids down the front of his shirt, wide forehead wrinkled in a permanent frown.
“How’s it going, Father?” Will said.
“Okay.” Father John took a pull of coffee, unable to shake the hard worry inside himself. He waited while the other elders joined in about the hot weather, the stunted hay in the fields, the new foreman at the Arapaho Ranch. It was still too early to get down to business.
Finally Will said, “You hear how Vicky’s doin’ with her new casino job?”
Father John set his mug on the table. “She’s worried,” he began. “She heard a rumor that Matt Kingdom could be helping people get jobs.”
Utica let out a guffaw. “Got that no good son of his an important job.”
“Good thing, ain’t it?” Will said. “Who else is gonna hire that boy? Hasn’t had a job in ten years.”
“I hear Matt’s sister’s working there,” James put in.
“Listen, Father.” Will unfolded his legs and leaned toward the table. “If that’s all that’s goin’ on, Vicky ain’t got nothing to worry about.”
Father John looked from one elder to the other. “What do you think is going on?”
Will sucked in his lower lip a moment before he said, “Ain’t gonna be nothing, long as Vicky’s looking after things.”
Father John pushed back against the rungs of his chair. Vicky was right, he thought. As long as she worked at the casino, the elders and everybody else on the reservation would think everything was fine.
He said, “Captain Jack Monroe’s trying to stop people from going to the casino.”
Will let out a loud snort. “That white man’s been going around saying gambling’s the devil’s work for a long time. Well, gambling ain’t good or bad. Just something the people always liked to do. Sometimes they lose, but it’s like giving to charity, you know. Share what you got with somebody might need it more.” The old man lifted his mug and set it down hard on the table to punctuate the point. “My grandfather used to talk about the games the people played.”
“Yeah, mine, too.” James shook his head at the memories. “Men used to carve dice out of bones and plum stones. Not like white men’s dice, but different shapes. Circles, rectangles, ovals.”
“They painted on the symbols,” Will said. “Tipis and moccasins and the four hills of life. Sometimes they’d paint na’kaox, the morning star, and little lines for buffalo grazing on the prairie.”
Utica had been quiet. Now he held up one hand. “Symbols only went on one side of the dice. You got that, Father?”
Father John said he got it.
“You’d make your bet,” Utica went on. “What’re you gonna bet? Your best pony? Good buffalo robe? You’d toss the dice in a basket and roll it out onto the ground. Sometimes, you used two dice, sometimes four or six, maybe more. If you shook out dice that fell the same, all the symbols on top, or all the blank sides on top—either way, you won the bet.”
“Ah”—Will tapped his mug on the table again—“the grandfathers had themselves a good time playing dice. The grandmothers, too. We didn’t discriminate none, when it come to gambling.”
There were other games. All three elders were talking at once now. Games with sticks and hoops. Games with balls and cups. All played for ponies or blankets or buffalo robes.
“Chi’chita’ne was a good game,” Utica said. “One of the boys’d get his bow and arrow ready to shoot. He’d have some grass that was bound up with sinew in one hand. He’d bet that he could drop the grass and shoot it with the arrow before it touched the ground. A’ba’ni’hi’, a’ba’ni’hi’, aticha’bi’nasana, aticha’bi’nasana, chi’chita’ne, chi’chita’ne. ”
“Got that?” Will bent his thin shoulders over the table, eyes blurry with amusement.
“I got the name of the game,” Father John said.
“My friend. My friend. Let us go out gambling. Let us go out gambling. At chi’chita’ne. At chi’chita’ne.” Will settled back in his chair. “Now we got craps, blackjack, roulette, bingo, poker, and slot machines. Same games, just different ways. Biggest thing people learned from gambling was that life’s a chance, you know. Nothing’s for certain. Can’t take nothing for granted.”
For a moment, the elders fell quiet. Then Utica flopped both forearms on the table and dropped his head, like a bull about to charge. “You hear what happened at Fort Washakie last night?”
Father John waited, his muscles tensing. More trouble, he could see it in the way the elder’s eyes had turned to stone.
Utica went on. “Truckload of whites from over Riverton showed up and pulled a couple Indians outta their pickup. Beat ’em up pretty good. Said they was paying back Indians for the white man got shot over at Double Dives.”
“Who were they?” Father John could still see Rodney Pearson’s wife sitting in his office. “You find that Indian that killed Rodney,” she’d said, “or Rodney’s friends are gonna find him.”
“They took off.” Utica tightened his fingers around his mug until his knuckles showed white. “They was probably halfway to Riverton before the cops showed up.”
The nearby tables had gone quiet, and Father John had a sense that the other elders were listening. He remained quiet a moment, an old ide
a working its way into his mind. Suppose Monroe had sent Tommy Willard to kill Dennis Light Stone and Tommy had shot Pearson instead. Gianelli had scoffed at the idea. Mistake a white man for an Indian? And Lela Running Bull had seemed relieved that the murdered man was white, as if that proved Tommy couldn’t have been involved.
But what if Gianelli and Lela were both wrong? What if Pearson had happened along, blundered into a murder about to take place, and gotten shot instead of the intended victim?
Father John pushed his chair back and got to his feet. He thanked the elders for their time and their stories and said he’d better get back to work. They nodded in unison, not taking their eyes from him, and told him to come around soon. He could still feel their eyes on his back as he crossed the room and flung open the door.
18
FATHER JOHN SLID into the pickup, found the cell phone in the glove compartment, and punched in Gianelli’s number. The answering machine picked up, and he heard his own voice speaking into the void. I have to talk to you. Call me.
He tossed the phone next to the tape player, flipped on Tosca again, and jammed the stick shift into reverse. He backed around the truck on the right and, forward now, spun out across the graveled drive and headed east on Seventeen-Mile Road.
He didn’t see the late-model, tan-colored truck until it had pulled around him, the noise of the engine roaring into his thoughts, tires thumping the asphalt. The truck cut in so short he had to step hard on the brake. There were two men inside, Indians by the black heads above the seat. Coming up in the rearview mirror was a dark-colored truck that looked almost purple in the sunshine. An Indian hunched over the steering wheel, another in the passenger seat.
They were crowding him now. He kept flicking his gaze between the tan truck ahead and the purple truck hugging his bumper in the rearview mirror. The driver was reaching out the window and setting something on the roof.
The siren wailed over the sounds of “E lucevan la stelle”; a blue light flashed on the roof. Ahead, the driver had turned on the right signal and raised his hand, motioning him toward the barrow ditch.
Father John kept going straight, waiting for the chance to swerve around the tan truck and gun the engine. The road stretched ahead as far as he could see. Empty. There were no houses, no one out in the fields. Nothing but the vast openness of the plains.
The Indians were not BIA police in unmarked vehicles, he was certain of it. Not state patrolmen or sheriff’s deputies or any other law-enforcement organization. He was being waylaid. Carjacking? Robbery? He stifled a laugh. He had twenty-some dollars and a few coins on him, and what would these Indians in their shiny trucks want with his old pickup?
There was a growing impatience in the whirl of the siren and the blue light behind him. Then he felt the shove against the rear bumper. The pickup lurched ahead, the music skipped a half measure. The Indian in the tan truck was gesturing with his fist toward the ditch.
Father John put on the right blinker. The instant the tan truck veered right, he jammed down on the accelerator and shot out into the oncoming lane, but the truck had swerved back. A blur of motion outside the passenger window. He stomped on the brake pedal, but it was too late. The jolt came in a cacophony of metal crumpling against metal and glass shattering. The steering wheel crashed into his ribs.
It was a moment before he understood that the pickup was standing still, the front end pushed up against the bed of the tan truck. The siren had stopped, and so had Tosca. The tape player lay upside down on the floor. Except for the hush of the wind coming over the plains, it was quiet.
“Now look what you done, Father.”
Father John winced with the pain that burned through his chest with every breath and looked up at the large Indian with short-cropped gray hair outside his window. The man was wearing army camouflage pants and a shirt with a silver bar on the breast pocket. Father John had to squint to read the black letters: Fasthorse. Another Indian, also in camouflage and burr haircut, had come up behind. Father John felt a twinge of surprise at how old they looked—at least his age, forty-eight. Maybe even older.
Ahead, the two men were crawling out of the tan truck. They were younger, probably in their twenties, dressed in camouflage that looked worn, battle-fatigued, the sleeves cut out, as if the men had just emerged from a firefight in a jungle. The driver was short and big-bellied with bowed legs. He walked with the stiff gait of a man who’d just gotten off a horse. The other Indian was close to six feet, gaunt looking, with long black hair slicked back from a narrow face and hooded eyes, and a blue-black tattoo of a bird that rippled on his skinny arm.
“You went and wrecked your nice pickup here,” Fasthorse was saying. “You should’ve pulled over.”
Father John pushed the door open, got out past the two older Indians, and walked to the front. The right bumper was smashed, the headlight broken, but with any luck, the engine would still run.
“Jack Monroe send you?” He looked back at Fasthorse, aware of the others moving in, like a lasso tightening around him.
“Captain wants to see you.” Fasthorse had planted his black boots a couple of feet apart and was standing with hands braced on his hips, thick, brown arms crooked out of the short sleeves of his shirt.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Sergeant Joe Fasthorse.” The Indian clicked his boots and straightened his arms. For a moment, Father John thought he was about to salute.
“Tell the Captain I’m unavailable.” He shouldered past and was about to get back into the pickup when he felt the hard grip on his arm.
“It’s an order, Father.”
Father John yanked his arm free and turned to face Fasthorse. “This isn’t the army, and I’m not one of Jack Monroe’s rangers.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the two younger Indians rear back, as if he’d tossed gravel in their eyes. Then the squat, bow-legged man took a step forward. Fasthorse shot him a look, and the man backed off.
“Captain says it’s urgent,” Fasthorse said, his voice strained, barely controlled. “Either you come with us on your own, or I have instructions . . .” He hesitated.
“Instructions for what?” Father John heard the sharpness in his own tone.
The Indian threw a glance over one shoulder at the gaunt young man with the tattoo, hovering near the tan truck. For the first time, Father John saw that the kid was holding a coiled rope next to his pants.
“Tommy here’ll escort you.”
“Tommy Willard.” Father John squared himself toward the young man with the sneer on his face and the hollow, drug-dead eyes. “I’ve heard about you,” he said.
The kid held his gaze and gave him what passed for a smile. He didn’t say anything.
Turning back to Fasthorse, Father John said, “Where’s Monroe?”
“Field headquarters. Tommy’ll drive you.”
“I’ll drive myself.” Father John nodded toward the lanky kid. “He can ride along.”
An argument played out behind Fasthorse’s eyes a couple seconds before he tossed his head toward Tommy and stepped back. The kid started toward the passenger side of the pickup, snapping the coiled rope against his thigh as he went. Father John threw open his door and got inside.
“We’ll escort you, Father, so I suggest you follow Dan’s truck . . .” Fasthorse nodded toward the bow-legged Indian about to drop into the tan truck. “Don’t try anything, or we’ll have to force you into the ditch. Wouldn’t want to wreck your pickup permanent-like and put you in the hospital for a good long time, now would we?”
“I have a meeting at the mission . . .” Father John glanced at his wristwatch. “One hour from now. If I’m not there, my assistant will notify the police.” The door slammed on the passenger side, and he was aware of Tommy sinking into the seat. “You understand? Every cop on the rez will be looking for this pickup.”
Fasthorse held his gaze a moment, then shrugged and followed the other gray-haired Indian back to the purple truck.
“Where’s Lela?” Father John pulled out behind the tan truck and glanced over at the kid beside him. The wind was blowing his hair around his face, and he lifted a skinny arm and pushed it back. The bird tattoo wiggled on his biceps.
“Lela who?” The kid’s voice came from down in his throat, behind clenched teeth.
“I know all about you, Tommy.” Father John kept his eyes on the truck no more than ten feet ahead, rolling down the road at about thirty-five miles an hour. The purple truck was on his tail. They were like a funeral cortege turning onto Rendezvous Road.
“You were with Lela out at Double Dives,” Father John went on. “You saw the body, just like she did.”
“Yeah, well that bitch pokes her nose into lotta things that ain’t none of her business.”
“That right? Is that why you hit her?”
The Indian didn’t say anything, but Father John could hear him taking in a breath, as if he were sucking air through a straw. “You like hitting girls, Tommy? Makes you feel like a big man?”
“So I hit her. So what? Nothing like what the Captain did to her.”
“What did he do?” Father John felt the constriction in his throat.
“Said he had to teach her to keep her mouth shut, that’s all. Knocked her around a little.”
“Jesus, Tommy. Is she okay?”
The kid started laughing. It was a sharp, metallic sound. “Learned her lesson, that’s for sure.”
“You’ve got to take her home, Tommy.”
Killing Raven (A Wind River Reservation Myste) Page 13