Killing a Cold One

by Joseph Heywood

  “You are a violent man, Noonan.”

  “I might allow I got tendencies. You met Luce?”

  “Couple times in the long waybackago.”

  “Let me do the talking.”

  •••

  Lucy’s had not changed, but she had aged badly. She now sported a thick black bristle of a mustache, a majestic furry caterpillar over her upper lip.

  “Suit,” she said when they walked in.

  Service felt her eyes on him. “Where you got off to, Service? Liberia?”

  “U.P., Michigan’s Siberia.”

  “Hear dat,” she said, nodding.

  Service was impressed by her memory.

  “S’up, Luce?” Noonan asked.

  “You know,” she muttered, “stuff and shit, little this, little dat, like always.”

  “Could use some help, Luce.”

  The woman ladled dark soup from a cauldron perched on a massive stove burner, topped it with raw onions and slivers of red chilis. “T’ought you done retire, Suit, gole watch an’ all dat shit,” she said.

  “Tru dat,” he said. “Favor for a friend, here. Place ain’t changed, Luce, eats good, smells good.”

  “Rent up ten ex,” she said. “B’lee dat?”

  “Everywhere,” Noonan said. “Punks and zombies got all the bread.”

  Lucy chuckled. “What you want, Suit?”

  Noonan asked, “Tonia Sorrowhorse still around?”

  “Not by much . . . She been bit by Dr. Slim.”

  Service saw Noonan’s mouth briefly hang open, as if he had been taken by surprise. Service knew Dr. Slim was AIDS in this neighborhood. It was a term he had never heard in the U.P.

  “That shit be ev’where these days,” Lucy said. “People won’t even touch them folks when they die. Just leave ’em rot like dead wolf in woods.”

  Service was surprised at her reference. How did an inner Detroit black woman know that nothing in the woods would eat on a dead wolf? Worms consumed them, never predators or scavengers.

  •••

  They drove to the address Lucy gave them. Same place Tonia had lived when Service had been a Troop. “Should have just come here in the first place,” Service said.

  “Lucy’s the unofficial mayor of a big chunk of Detroit. We pay homage, she keeps her ears on for us. Rules of the road, man, matter of ghettocol.” Noonan looked at the house. “This area a Ciz Seven, man.”

  “Meaning?”

  “My first partner, Big George Ciz, he made his own scale of Motown badness, with Ciz Ten the worst. “

  “So seven’s good?”

  “Under ten ain’t synonymous with good,” Noonan said.

  An old man with yellowing hennaed dreadlocks answered the door.

  “Tonia,” Noonan said.

  “You the Man?” the man asked.

  “Not here, not no more. I’m an old friend,” Noonan said.

  “She ain’t seein’ no frens, my fren,” the man said.

  Noonan eased the old man aside. “Sorry, Pops, she’ll see me.”

  It had once been an elegant house and was now on its last legs. Tonia Sorrowhorse was in the parlor in a crank-up hospital bed, an IV in her left arm, oxygen tubes in her nostrils, the scent of decay and impending death deep in every pore of the room. Noonan sat on her bedside, kissed her forehead. “Bambi, baby.”

  The woman’s eyes flickered. Yellow, rheumy, sunken, scared. “Glenn?”

  “Heard you’re feelin’ poorly,” he said.

  She tried a smile, but failed. “Dead meat, Suit. Was prime meat, now soon gone be dead meat. Dr. Slim.”

  “I heard.”

  “Dr. Slim get you, too?”

  “Maybe,” Noonan allowed.

  “Can’t win ’gainst Dr. Slim,” she muttered. “You want here, Suit? Do the nasty?” She grinned devilishly, stretching her lips tightly across her yellowed teeth and dark gums.

  “You up for it?” he asked.

  “Shee-it. That funny,” she whispered. “You know I born ready, dig?” She took his hand and tried to squeeze, but Service could see she lacked the strength. “I done it all,” she said.

  As good an epitaph as any, Service decided.

  “They take good care of you, Bambi, honey?” Noonan asked.

  “Hopspits,” she said. “Nice folks come dance with the dying.” She stared at the IV drip. “They givin’ me the good shit for pain. I flyin’, Suit. Got Dr. Slim fum bumpin’ shit, now they gi’ me same shit fo’ Dr. Slim. Tell me, dat make sense?” She closed her eyes, sighed softly.

  Service watched Noonan squeeze the woman’s bony hand. “We need information. We’ll pay.”

  “You come, didn’t you?” she said.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” he said.

  “Then you paid enough,” she said. “What you want?”

  “We’ve got some nasty kills, no IDs, DNA telling us Indian blood. Who’s Top Tonto these days, and where do we find him?”

  “Dr. Slim turn snatch to snitch,” she said. “Call him Speedoboy, aka Dwayne, last name unknown, works the doghouse, grabbing baby girls.”

  “Greyhound Station?” Noonan said.

  She nodded. “Some say he take those little girlies, turn ’em out, work on the stree’, but ain’t like dat, Suit. Speedoboy, he help them babies, pull them out ’fore they get fucked up, put them on buses back home. Got a bad rep fum some, hear what I’m saying? Jealousy, envy, an’ shit like dat.”

  “You know him?”

  She nodded. “Bambi know ev’body, Suit. Your fren’ there, he a State boy here one time, move to be fish cop.”

  Service was impressed at her memory, decided survival in a wilderness of any description was helped by a solid memory.

  “Be careful, Suit. Speedoboy, he fat man, Ojibwe.” She inflated her cheeks. “Like dat? Careful, dough. He fat, not soft, dig?”

  Noonan kissed her and held her close until she seemed to be asleep. The man with the pink dreads was sitting on the stairs by the front door, smoking a pipe. “How long’s she got?” Noonan asked.

  “Hours, minutes. Only Jesus answer dat.”

  Noonan fished three one-hundred-dollar bills from his wallet, pushed them into the man’s hand. “No pain. Get if off the street, you have to.”

  The man nodded, took the money, looked him up and down. “Bluesuit Noonan?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  •••

  The Greyhound station had been renovated since Service had left Detroit, or else it was entirely new. Decades of dinge had been replaced with chrome columns, huge glass walls and partitions, potted trees, carpet, red and blue plastic seating, all covered with fresh dinge. He instantly loathed it.

  Speedoboy was the Man and easy enough to locate. He worked out of a black Astro van parked across the street. Noonan read the deal immediately. His teenage posse scouted arriving buses while the boss sat back. Eventually an enormous and obese man slid out of the van and lumbered slowly toward the terminal, legs apart, sagging in style (or fighting a rash, it was hard for Service to tell). Bodyguards followed and led, two lines, twenty feet from the man. Sloppy security. Noonan used an open flank to cut in, and Service followed right behind him.

  “Speedoboy,” Noonan said. “Bambi Sorrowhorse say you Top Tonto.”

  Fat but not soft; her characterization was correct, Service saw. The man had a thick corded neck, massive hands. Service flashed his badge. “We need to talk privately—about Shinobs above the bridge.”

  The man’s voice was comic, high and slobbery, the opposite of his hard obsidian eyes. He led them into a public lavatory. A look sent his bodyguards out. Speedoboy stood at a urinal trough, grunting. “Got the bad p’ostate,” he said. “Low manifold pressure. You a long way from home, fish cop,” he said to Service.

 
“Bambi said you might help. She said you’re a good man with a bad rep.”

  “She a ho.”

  “Got the Dr. Slim,” Noonan interjected.

  “It always somepin’, ” Speedoboy said. “What you want?”

  Service told him about the killings.

  “I look like Ast-the-Motherfuckah-Dot-Com?”

  “You’ve got connections,” Noonan said. “What we seen up there is ugly, man. We want to bury some kids, not leave their spirits wandering.”

  “I didn’t make the world,” the man said.

  “No, but Bambi swears you’ve tried to make it a better place. This is like what you do for kids.”

  “People up north being ripped apart, chewed on,” Service said again.

  “I mebbe hear some shit. Dogman, right?”

  Noonan asked, “You b’lee dat dogman shit?”

  Speedoboy closed his eyes. “Windigo . . . You go talk wit’ Father Bill Eyes.”

  “Macomb County Father Bill?” Noonan said.

  “He the man.”

  •••

  The Macomb County Native American Center was just outside Mount Clemens. Air Guard jets thundered over the old Selfridge Air Force Base, now an Air National Guard operation. The center was run by a half-breed Cree priest, Father Bill Eyes. They found him playing basketball with kids half his age, twice his size, and holding his own.

  They sat with the priest while he rested with a bottle of pale green fluid. “Gatorade—electrolytes,” he explained. “As mysterious as the Holy Ghost. You have to take the existence of both on faith. Thought you retired, Suit,” he said to Noonan.

  “Did, but helping my friend here, Conservation Officer Grady Service. Woods cop up in the U.P.”

  “You a Catholic?” the priest asked Service.

  “Raised one, but more Non-Pref now,” he answered.

  “What can I do for you?”

  Service told him the story, adding the word windigo, but omitting mention of Speedoboy.

  The priest invited them for a late dinner, but Noonan refused politely.

  “The windigo is real,” the priest said. “But let’s define the word real in this context. It’s not a myth or fairy tale. It scares the hell out of tribals—as well it should. Psychiatrists define it as windigo psychosis. Almost always hits males with families. They get into a spell of bad luck and begin thinking they’ve been inhabited by a windigo spirit. Makes them cold all the time, like they’re filled with ice, and insatiably hungry for human meat. They sometimes turn to cannibalism, and start by murdering and eating their own families before reaching out to others.”

  Service had trouble processing what he had heard. “What’s this thing look like?”

  “Like any person. It’s a mental disorder.”

  “Not hairy, like a dog or wolf.”

  “We’re not talking about a werewolf, though the French concept of loup garou included werewolves and windigos, stretching back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”

  “How do people detect it?”

  “Usually they don’t until its too late and the killing begins. In some places there are elders who know how to identify symptoms, but they’re dying out over time. It’s possible to intervene early and stop it from progressing, but this rarely happens. Medical science can treat the disorder with a number of psychoactive agents, but usually the windigo ends up dead before any westernized medicos can get involved. The degree of fear this condition creates is difficult for a white person to appreciate.”

  “Happens in this state?” Service said. “I’ve never heard any such thing.”

  “Rare condition anywhere, never in this state, so far as I know. Mostly in Canada. I’ve heard of someone who’s a true expert on the condition. Name is Lupo, Grant Lupo, a professor of aboriginal ethnology at Michigan Tech. I can find out how to contact him, ask if he’ll get in touch with you and help. He seems to know just about everything about this disorder from what I remember. Problem is that Lupo’s got a bad dose of egomania. Late thirties, Hollywood looks; women cling to him like barnacles.”

  “How would one know if there’s a problem?”

  “Tribals won’t say much to whites, so they’ll keep it close in their own community. But you’ll start to see amulets, manitu pouches—things to ward off the evil spirit.”

  “Pouches, like little leather bags?”

  “Very common,” the priest said. “If they start to become widespread, you can interpret it that the people think a windigo is operating. The bags will have small red figures on them, like stick figures. This represents the evil—the beast.”

  Service gave the priest his business card and thanked him.

  “You know Father Clem Varhola?” the priest asked.

  “May have heard the name; might even have met him once. Why?”

  “No reason. Just priestly curiosity,” Father Eyes said in an icy tone. “You think you might have this problem up your way?”

  “Got something around L’Anse, just not sure what yet.”

  “Father Clement Varhola,” the priest said, rolling his eyes. “Over in Assinins, north of Baraga.”

  “Someone we should talk to?” Service asked.

  “Only if you have to.”

  •••

  A young Hispanic woman had replaced the man with dreadlocks at Tonia’s house. She let them in without a challenge.

  Tonia died just before noon the next day, with Noonan holding her hand and Service in a threadbare wingback chair faded from burgundy to skin tone. She was cremated the next morning. No funeral, no memorial service, no next of kin. Noonan placed obituaries in the two Detroit daily papers. “Tonia Sorrowhorse passed away peacefully. She did everything in life with grace.”

  Service decided that the extremely strange retired detective was one of the rarest of creatures: one who took friendship as a sacred pledge.

  23

  Thursday, November 13

  BLOOD CREEK CAMPGROUND, BARAGA COUNTY

  Travel was beginning to wear on Service mentally and physically. So much time in trucks, always moving; he had lower back pain and felt perpetually velocitized. As they headed north that morning, Friday telephoned.

  “I’ve been thinking about our victims’ feet,” she said. “Why does he leave the heads and hands, but take some feet? It makes no sense. As I think about it, the victims so far aren’t necessarily the type who’d be fingerprinted—you know, ex–special military, cops, or ex-cons—so the perp may feel safe in leaving hands and heads. Last night I was thinking about Shigun and that girl in Mack City, and it hit me: Hospitals up here take footprints of newborns and give them to the families as souvenirs. They have no official standing, or legal value as ID, but there are prints of every kid born in U.P. hospitals. Could be a back door in for us. Also, those hearts at Nepo’s? They were porcine, which I don’t get. Where are you?”

  “Headed north to talk to Denninger. We had a meeting with a priest in Mount Clemens, and he told us about some stuff that may or may not relate.”

  “Care to share?”

  “I don’t know enough to share yet. This Father Bill Eyes is going to put us in touch with a Tech professor named Lupo who might be able to help us. Denninger called, and she wants to meet out at the Ridge, something relating to Kelly Johnstone.”

  “She’s surfaced?”

  “Don’t know. Dani just said she wants us over there, so we’ll collect Tree and Limpy and head over that way.”

  “Meaning Johnstone’s still AWOL?”

  “Apparently.”

  “She that important?”

  “Can’t say she’s not; we do know that if something is going on anywhere in the Ridge community, Johnstone will know what it is.”

  “We’ll talk later,” Friday said, and broke off.

  •••


  Blood Creek flowed into the Sturgeon River about two miles east of where the Sturgeon curled into Houghton County. The campground had been closed years before, too little use, too remote, too small. There were eight campsites on a steep rocky precipice, with a drop of at least one hundred feet straight down.

  It was just turning dark when they all pulled into the campground entrance road and parked.

  Denninger had not been able to find Johnstone, but she had found deerskin pouches on every door of every house and trailer she had checked in the Ridge community, and while the Natives refused to talk, much less explain, a citizen named Rodney Folsom called her to let her know he had heard from a friend that “untoward things were occurring out at the Blood Creek Campground.” She pulled Service aside, told him all of this quickly as she studied the man sitting in her truck: blond, balding, beady-eyed, breathing through the mouth, squinty, with lizard-like brown eyes. She referred to him as Rod the Odd.

  One look told Service her description seemed to fit. Mr. Folsom lived downstate, was chief financial officer for a multimillion-dollar trash company headquartered in Grand Rapids. The man had no specifics to share on the campground warning, but Denninger had persuaded him to come along. Service could see the man was both irritated and intimidated and trying to balance the two feelings.

  Service heard him tell Dani, “I’m a CFO.”

  She said, “And I’m a CO. We share two letters in our titles, so what’s your point?”

  The man grimaced. “I did my duty as a good citizen, notified the authorities.”

  “You gave us no details. Do CFOs and accountants accept reports and balance sheets with no details or specifics?”

  “Of course not,” Rod the Odd said.

  “There you go,” Denninger said with a huge grin.

  Service marveled at her skill in handling the man, who was obviously accustomed to giving orders, not taking them, especially from women.