Death Along the Spirit Road

by C. M. Wendelboe

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  HELP FROM A HIGHER POWER

  He tried reaching the Glock. Three steps. Closer. Reached again. Steps stopped outside his shattered window. He lay on his arm, trapped, unable to get to the weapon. He willed his labored breathing to stop. He told the rising and falling of his chest to be still. He lay quiet, listening, praying to God he could pull it off. His hand fell automatically onto his medicine bundle.

  Someone shined a flashlight into Manny’s car. Through his closed eyelids, Manny saw all this as if he were sitting in a theater watching some dark, foreboding movie. Light played across his lids. He wanted to open them, wanted to look at his attacker, but he didn’t. The driver squatted inches from him, close enough that Manny felt warm puffs of breath on his neck through the window. He struggled to remain conscious. His cop side took over, and he listened for anything that would later identify the attacker. If he lived through this . . .

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2011 by C. M. Wendelboe.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wendelboe, C. M.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-47871-4

  1. Dakota Indians—Fiction. 2. Indian reservations—South Dakota—Fiction. 3. Real estate developers—Crimes against—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3623.E53D43 2011

  813'.6—dc22

  2010038253

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To Milt Wendelboe,

  who was a voracious reader until the day he died.

  And my Lakota friends,

  who kept me on my own Road.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank my agent, Bill Contardi, and my editor, Tom Colgan, for having faith to take a chance on a rookie, and Eric Boss and Mike McGroder, for greasing the wheels and to Richard Tuschman, whose beauty with the brush portrayed so precisely the mood and theme of the novel. I thank my mentors Judy and Craig Johnson and my wife, Heather Wendelboe: Without their help, you wouldn’t be reading this.

  CHAPTER 1

  Manny popped another CD into the player in the rental and fiddled with the controls. The Six Fat Dutchmen pounded out the “Tick-Tock Polka.” He settled back in his seat, tapping the oomp-ba oomp-ba tuba beat on the steering wheel. How long had it been since he danced a polka? Must have been back in Germany in his army days. Oomp-ba-ba. Oomp-ba. He had tried accordion lessons back then, but he couldn’t read music any better than he could drive. Oomp-ba. Oomp-ba. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Like the song was ticking away at his life.

  He bent forward to adjust the bass to accentuate the heavy tuba and caught movement in his periphery. A teen, wearing a T-shirt missing one sleeve with jeans threatening to fall down his meatless hips, stumbled between two parked cars and started across the road. The gaunt young man looked up. Eyes wide. Mouth open. Manny slammed on the brakes, and the tires of the Taurus bit into the hot asphalt. Things kicked into slow motion, like his academy instructors said happened under great stress.

  The car skidded. Tires pleaded and screamed. The boy yelled, his face bombarded with loose gravel from the road. His hands hopelessly covered his face and he tried jumping out of the car’s path, but he was too slow. Too drunk. The houses beside the road. Abandoned cars. Trees. All blacked out. Manny focused in front of the car, the kid walking in slow motion on instant replay.

  The car rocked to a stop. The seat belt bit into Manny’s shoulder and held him inches away from the steering wheel. Burnt tire smoke rose up, dark and dense. It assaulted Manny’s nose with its bitter accusation, and he rubbed his eyes. The boy was gone.

  Manny opened the door and stepped out as the boy rose from the pavement in front of the car. Eighteen going on forty: his face red, splintery, broken capillaries. He glared at Manny through eyes watery with wine and stinging with indignation. Hate replaced terror. He picked up his hat and slapped it against his ripped jeans. Dust fell off the cap as he jammed it on his head, and he jutted his middle finger high in the air as he scowled at Manny. With that gesture their sole conversation, the kid turned and staggered down the road.

  “Screw you!” Manny said. “Watch where the hell you’re going.”

  Manny’s heart pounded as forcefully as the beat of the Six Fat Dutchmen still reverberating in the car. He took deep breaths and began to see trees and weeds at the side of the road as his vision returned to normal. He watched the kid stop beside an abandoned pickup by the Pronto Auto Parts store. He climbed in the bed and lay down to start his afternoon pass-out, the top of his ball cap visible above the tailgate.

  “Damned drunk.”

  Manny’s legs still shook as he sat back in the car. The arteries in his neck pounded oomp-ba, oomp-ba, to the beat of the polka music, and his hand trembled as reached for the player and tapped the power button. The music died, and he closed his eyes and willed his breathing to slow. “Damned fool would have deserved it,” he said aloud. “Walking with his head in his ass.”

  Manny fingered his medicine bag, held his wopiye to the light. The blue and black beaded deerskin turtle had become faded and tattered around
the edges from being carried so long. It was always with him. Unc said his wopiye had powers to help him through life, though he fought hard to believe it even as a boy. When the yuwipi man had given him his inyan, somewhere in the recesses of his Lakota soul Manny wanted to believe that this bundle with the black spirit stone would protect him. As it had now. As it had then.

  “That could have been me.” If Unc hadn’t taken me in when the folks died, that could have been me.

  Manny drove into Pine Ridge Village. Shanties and shacks and trailer houses, missing so many windows that they looked like schoolkids who’d been busted in the chops once too often, were spaced erratically on both sides of the road. What shingles remained to protect tattered tar-paper roofs gave the shanties the illusion of a bad haircut. No one should live in them, but people did. Just as people used the abandoned cars along the road to sleep in. Or to trade sex for booze. Or to hide bodies long dead. All these things had not changed. Manny had known this even as he accepted the assignment.

  The buildings stood crumbling and bowed, like the broken spirit of the Lakota people. The reservation was one hundred years of history unmarked by progress, and things were worse than when Manny lived here. Pejuty Drug Store, where he had often bought candy as a boy, his patched dungarees full of change after finishing a chore his uncle Marion had given him, was gone. And the Wright and McGill snelling factory. It had employed more than four hundred people, but the owners found poor people overseas willing to work for even lower wages than the Indians. Now the fishhook factory stood as vacant as the stares of out-of-work Oglala.

  Then he laughed. “Who the hell ever gives me a choice of assignments?” Whenever Ben Niles called Special Agent Manny Tanno to his office, it was to assign him an investigation no one else wanted. Usually on some Indian reservation no one wanted to go to. “Some choice.” There was a bowling alley then, as well as a moccasin factory, and Gerber’s Hotel, all boarded up now. Manny guessed that travelers were shit out of luck if they wanted a place to stay for the night.

  Special Agent Manny Tanno cursed Jason Red Cloud for getting killed and dragging him back here. He cursed Ben Niles for assigning him every dispute on every Indian reservation in the country because he was the FBI token Indian-of-the-moment. And he cursed himself for accepting this assignment on Pine Ridge: He had not thought of the reservation for so long that he had become comfortable thinking it was a place where other Indians lived, not the place where he was from.

  It was midday and the customers at Big Bat’s gas station and convenience store stood three-deep at the food counter waiting to place their orders. The counter girl, wearing an ANGELICA name tag, took orders and handed them back to the cook through an open window into the kitchen. Bacon crackled on the grill, and the odor of grease and frying eggs made Manny retch. The drunk in the street was still strong in his mind, the boy’s near-death lingering. He was still pissed. That kid had nearly cost Manny his career, nearly missed getting himself hit—and the news would have been reported that an FBI agent ran an Indian down on his own reservation.

  “Order.” Angelica grabbed a stub of pencil from behind her ear and held it poised over a paper pad. He didn’t recognize her, couldn’t recognize her, it had been so long since he had been home. He guessed her age at eighteen, probably just out of high school, if her parents had enough discipline to send her to school. She was rushing, though, so maybe she’d had enough gumption to graduate.

  “I’ll just have coffee.”

  She smiled at him as if he’d just placed the biggest order of the day and directed him to the coffee urns along one wall. He stood in line as a couple alternated filling their sodas and pinching one another on the butt. They eyed Manny’s starched white shirt, then worked their way down to his Dockers and wing tips. One whispered to the other and they both laughed. They started for a booth when one nodded to the counter. Manny followed the nod. He turned and saw a boy, younger than the counter girl but nearly as big as Manny, elbow a woman aside. Her breakfast burrito fell to the floor.

  The boy ignored her and tossed two sandwiches onto the counter. “What the hell’s this slop?” He asked belligerently as Angelica backed away. “Get that cook off his ass and have him make me a new order.”

  “That’s enough, Lenny.” The cook, wiping his hands on his apron, emerged from the kitchen. “I’ll make a new order.”

  Lenny reached across the counter and grabbed the cook’s shirt. Manny set his coffee on a table and approached Lenny, who had one foot on the counter ready to climb over.

  “Maybe you ought to chill out.”

  Lenny put his foot back onto the floor and shifted his threatening stance toward Manny. The kid’s fists clenched and unclenched, and the adolescent stubble rippled on his cheeks as his jaw tightened. “Maybe I don’t want to chill out.”

  “Let it alone, kid.”

  “Just who the hell are you to tell me what to do?” Lenny stepped closer, and his breath stank of cheap whiskey. “You ain’t the cops.”

  “But I am.” Manny flashed his badge and ID wallet.

  “This here’s an FBI agent,” Lenny yelled. He staggered back, then turned and started climbing back onto the counter. “Ain’t that something.”

  Manny grabbed him by the arm, twisted it behind him, and pushed him out the door into the heat of the parking lot. Lenny jerked his arm away and stumbled on the curb. Manny caught him before he fell.

  “Leave me alone. What the hell’s the FBI doing here anyhow? I thought we run you off years ago.”

  “There’s no one to hear you out here, so you can drop the macho bullshit. I don’t know what your problem is . . .”

  “Course you don’t. You ain’t even from here.”

  “But you better get a handle on it. It’s summer and you should be working instead of killing the day killing beer.”

  “I got a job.”

  Manny didn’t want to talk to the kid any longer than he had to. He’d been assigned to Pine Ridge just for the case, and he didn’t have the time to be a social worker to these people.

  Lenny stumbled down the street and Manny returned to the store. His coffee had been overturned and the cup still lay in the brown puddle on the table. Someone behind him laughed. He ignored it and walked back to the coffee urn and filled a fresh cup. This time he took it and walked back to his car.

  He put the coffee in the cup holder, started the car, and drove toward the justice building. He should have ordered some food, since Big Bat’s was the only place in town to eat, but he had to be careful. Nearing fifty, his six-pack had become a round keg sitting on top of a tap he rarely used anymore. When he woke up one morning four months ago, he entered a quit smoking program sponsored by the FBI and forced himself to put on his Nikes and running shorts, something he’d not done for years. Running came back into his daily routine and allowed him time alone to work out problems by himself.

  Manny caught the only traffic light on Pine Ridge. The light made him wait, made him watch. Four young men stuffed into a tiny Mazda coupe careened around the corner. The driver half hung out the window, yelling as the other three joined the chorus. They skidded to a stop just as a 1970s Country Squire wagon, backyard-converted into a pickup, jumped through the light. The back end was cut off above the fenders, the makeshift bed topped with channel iron. A piece of plywood, which covered the hole where the back window had been, was held into the opening by bailing wire. The converted wagon bounced through the intersection like an out-of-place lowrider from East L.A. The lot lizards sitting on car hoods on the other side of the road whooped and yelled. Out-of-work Indians with nothing else to do on a 101-degree day on what used to be called Bullshit Corner. By the looks of things, it still was.

  Then the light winked. Or rather, it changed. Manny passed the girl in the homemade pickup. She lit up a bowl of what he was certain wasn’t tobacco. He coughed as he tasted the oily exhaust smoke and hastily rolled up the window.

  He entered the chain-link-enclosed back parking l
ot of the justice building and parked between an Impala with a sizeable dent in one fender and a Crown Victoria with a bloody dimple on the trunk. Little had changed here since his own days as an Oglala Sioux tribal cop. Dents were worn like badges of honor, since resistive prisoners were often educated on the trunk of a cruiser before being jailed. “Wall-to-wall counseling.” Manny chuckled to himself. He stepped from the rental and stretched his back. Eighteen years had made little difference in his old stomping grounds. The lot looked as if it had been paved about the time he left for D.C. Weeds still grew through cracks in the asphalt. Most of the tribal police vehicles sported old rusted dents and scrapes bleeding through the fresh ones. One cruiser was missing a front fender. Another thrust its bent radio antenna toward the building as if it were half of some divining rod.

  Two officers charged through the door. They glanced at Manny as they ran to a Dodge Durango, spinning gravel on their way to a family fight. Or an accident. Or a gun call. Manny thought of the times he had answered those calls, remembered, and thanked God the FBI employed him now rather than the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

  He opened the door of the justice building, stepped inside, and let his eyes adjust from the sun that filtered through his Gargoyles. He looked past the long, narrow counter through the bullet-resistant glass. It was the American Indian Movement turmoil that had forced the tribe and Bureau of Indian Affairs to harden the building on Pine Ridge, and violence frequented the police station even now.

  A girl half Manny’s age rose from her desk and walked to the audio port behind the glass. Manny read her name tag: SHANNON HORN.

  “Any relation to Verlyn Horn?” Manny asked as he pointed to her name tag.