by Shadow Prey
“You don’t know that . . . .”
“Don’t be an old woman, Father,” Shadow Love snapped. “It’s dangerous.” He held the older man’s eyes for a moment, then turned back to Billy. “Somebody will tell. Somebody will tell on us all, sooner or later. I met one of the cops doing the investigation. He’s a hunter, you can smell it on him. He’ll be after us, and he’s not some South Dakota sheriff’s cousin, some retreaded shitkicker calling himself a cop. He’s a hard man. And even if he doesn’t get us, somebody will. Sooner or later. Everyone in this room is a dead man walking.”
Billy Hood looked into Shadow Love’s face for a moment, then nodded and seemed to grow taller. “You’re right,” he said, his voice suddenly calm. “I should do another while I can. Before they get me.”
Sam clapped him on the back. “Good. We have a target.”
“Where’s John? Is he out?”
“Yeah. Out in Brookings.”
“Ah, Jesus, he’s going after Linstad?”
“Yup.”
“That’s a big one,” Billy said. He ran his hand through his hair. “I gotta get home, get some sleep. Maybe I’ll go up north and see Ginnie and the girl, you know? Tomorrow or the day after.”
“Come on down to the river with us,” Sam suggested. “We’re doing a sweat. You’ll feel a hundred percent better afterwards. We got some bags too, and a couple of tents. You can sleep out on the island.”
“All right,” Billy nodded. “My ass is whipped, man . . . .”
“And we’ve got to talk about a man in Milwaukee,” said Sam. “The guy who’s figuring the strategy for attacking the land rights up north. Smart guy . . .”
“I don’t know if I can do the knife again, man. This Andretti guy, the blood was coming out of his neck like a hose.” Billy sounded shaky again and Sam stopped him with a wave of his hand.
“The knife is good because it means something to the people and something to the media,” he said, “But it’s not the main thing. In Milwaukee, use a pistol. Use a rifle. The important thing is to kill the guy.”
Aaron nodded. “Wear the knife around your neck. If you’re taken, that’ll be good enough.”
“I won’t be taken,” Billy said. His voice was trembling and low, but he held it together. “If I can’t get away, I’ll go like Bluebird.”
They talked for another fifteen minutes while Aaron gathered up the dried sage and red willow he used in the sweats. Sam couldn’t sleep without a pillow, so he got one off the bed. They were walking out the door when the phone rang.
Aaron picked it up, said hello, listened a second, smiled and said, “Leo, God damn. We were worried . . . .”
Leo Clark was calling from Wichita. Oklahoma City was a war zone, he said. The police and the FBI were crawling through the Indian community. He’d gotten out of town immediately after the killing, hidden at a friend’s house the next day, gotten a haircut and then driven to Wichita.
“What’s happening there?” Leo asked.
“Not much. But there are FBI agents all over the place. So it’s just a matter of time . . . .”
“I wish we’d hear . . .”
“The media’s talking about war, so we got that across.”
“Gotta keep pumping . . .”
“Yeah. Tell me what the judge said just before you took him,” Aaron said. He listened intently and finally said, “Okay. I’m going to put some of that in the press release, so they’ll know it’s for real . . . and I’ll put in a quote from you, like we agreed.”
They talked for another minute and then Aaron hung up. “He’s on his way in,” he said. “He cut his hair. No more braids.”
“Too bad,” said Sam. “That boy had a good hair on him.”
“No more. He’s got sidewalls and a flattop,” Aaron Crow said, chuckling. “He says he looks like a fuckin’ Marine.”
The sweat lodge was on the island below Fort Snelling, at the junction of the Minnesota and Mississippi, on the ground that held Sioux bones from the death camp. Aaron Crow could feel them there, still crying, tearing his flesh like fishhooks. Sam Crow held him, fearing that his other half would die of a burst heart. Billy Hood prayed and sweated, prayed and sweated, until the fear and anguish of the Andretti kill ran out of him into the ground. Shadow Love glowered in the heat, watching the others. He felt the bones in the ground, but he never prayed a word.
Long after midnight, they sat on the edge of the river, watching the water roll by. Billy lit a cigarette with a Zippo lighter, took a drag.
“Killing a man is a lot harder than I thought. It’s not doing it that’s so hard. It’s afterwards. Doing it, it’s like cutting the head off a chicken with a hatchet. You just do it. Later, thinking about it, I got the sweats.”
“You think too much,” said Shadow Love. “I’ve killed three. The feeling isn’t bad; it’s pretty good, really. You win. You send another one of them assholes straight to hell.”
“You killed three?” Aaron said sharply. “I know two. One in South Dakota, one in Los Angeles: the drug man and the Nazi.”
“There’s another one now,” Shadow Love said. “I put his body into the river below the Lake Street bridge.” He gestured at the river. “He may be floating past right now, while we smoke.”
The Crows looked at each other, and a tear ran down Aaron’s face. Sam reached out and thumbed it away.
“Why?” Aaron asked his son.
“Because he was a traitor.”
“You mean he was one of the people?” Aaron’s voice rose in fear and anguish.
“A traitor,” Shadow Love said. “He put the police on Bluebird.”
Aaron was on his feet, his hands at the sides of his head, pressing together. “No, no no no no . . .”
“Yellow Hand he was, from Fort Thompson,” Shadow Love said.
“I can hear the bones,” Aaron groaned. “Yellow Hand’s people were free warriors. They died for us and now we have killed one of theirs. They are screaming at us . . . .”
Shadow Love stood and spit into the river. “A man is a fuckin’ man and that’s all,” he said. “Just a fuckin’ piece of meat. I’m trying to keep you free and you won’t even give me that.”
Billy Hood never could get his head quite right in the borrowed sleeping bag. After a difficult night, he woke well before dawn with a crick in his neck. While the Crows and Shadow Love slept, he crawled out of the tent and lit the Coleman lantern, moved quietly into the woods, dug a cathole and used it. When he finished, he kicked dirt in the hole and started collecting wood.
A jungle of dead trees stood along the waterline. Hood gathered a dozen limbs as long and thick as his forearm and hauled them back to the campsite. Using twigs and finger-thick sticks, he built a foot-high tepee-shaped starter fire, fanned it, waited until it was going good, then stacked on the heavier wood and topped the structure with a steel grate. The Crows kept a blue enameled-steel coffeepot in their truck, with a jar of instant coffee inside. He got it, filled the pot with water from a jug, dumped in what looked like enough coffee and put it on the grate.
“God damn.” Aaron Crow, moving. “Nothing smells as good as cookout coffee.”
“Got a couple of quarts of it out here,” Billy said.
Aaron crawled out of the tent, wearing a V-necked T-shirt and green boxer shorts. “Cups in the cooler, in the back of the truck,” he said.
Billy nodded and went to get them. Aaron looked toward the east, but there was no sign of the sun. He sniffed and the air smelled like morning, redolent of dew and river mud and boiling coffee. When Billy returned, Sam and Shadow Love were stirring.
“John ought to be in Brookings by now,” Billy said.
“Yeah.” Aaron handled the coffeepot off the fire with a hot pad and poured two cups. “So what are you going to do?”
“Go home, get cleaned up, maybe catch a few more hours of sleep, then go on up to Bemidji and see Ginnie and the kid. I’ll give you a call,” Billy said.
“Did you think
about Milwaukee?” Aaron asked.
“All night.” Billy took a sip of the scalding coffee, looking at Aaron over the rim of the cup. “I think I can handle it. The sweat helped.”
Aaron looked back at the sweat lodge. “Sweats always help. Sweats’d cure cancer, if they’d give them a chance.”
Billy nodded, but after a moment he said, “Don’t seem to help Shadow. No offense, Aaron, but that boy is one crazy motherfucker.”
CHAPTER
11
The phone woke Lucas a few minutes before six.
“Davenport,” he groaned.
“This is Del. Billy Hood just walked into his building.”
Lucas sat up: “You made him for sure?”
“No question, man. It’s him. He pulled up, hopped out and went inside before we could move. You better get your ass over here.”
“Did you call Lily?” Lucas put a finger behind his bedroom curtain and looked out. Still dark.
“She’s next on the list.”
“I’ll call her. You call Daniel . . . .”
“Already did. He said go with the plan, like we talked,” Del said.
“How about the feebs?”
“The guy here called his AIC.”
Lily answered on the third ring, her voice croaking like a rusty gate.
“You awake?” Lucas asked.
“What do you want, Davenport?”
“I thought I’d call and see if you were lying there naked.”
“Jesus Christ, are you nuts? What time . . . ?”
“Billy Hood just rolled into his apartment.”
“What?”
“I’ll pick you up outside your hotel in ten minutes. Ten to fifteen. Brush your teeth, take a shower, run downstairs . . . .”
“Ten minutes,” she said.
Lucas showered, brushed, pulled on jeans, a sweatshirt and a cotton jacket, and was outside five minutes after he talked to Lily. Rush hour was beginning: he punched the Porsche down Cretin Avenue, driving mostly on the wrong side of the street, jumping one red light and stretching a couple of greens. He put the car on I-94 and made it to Lily’s hotel twelve minutes after he had hung up the phone. She was walking out of the lobby doors when he pulled in.
“No question about the ID?” she snapped.
“No.” He looked at her. “You’re a little pale.”
“Too early. And I’m a little queasy. I thought about stopping in the coffee shop for a roll, but I thought I better not,” she said. Her voice was all business. She wouldn’t meet his eye.
“You had a few last night.”
“A few too many. I appreciate . . . you know.”
“You were hot,” Lucas said bluntly, but with a smile.
She blushed, furious. “Christ, Davenport, give me a break?”
“No.”
“I shouldn’t be riding with you,” she said, looking out the window.
“You wanted to roll, last night. You backed out. I can live with it. The big question is . . .”
“What?”
“Can you?”
She looked at him and her voice carried an edge of disdain. “Ah, the Great Lover speaks . . . .”
“Great Lover, bullshit,” Lucas said. “You were hungry. That didn’t develop since you met me.”
“I happen to be . . .” she started.
“ . . . very happily married,” they said in unison.
“I want you pretty bad,” Lucas said after a moment. “I feel like I’m smothering.”
“Jesus, I don’t know about this,” she said, looking away.
Lucas touched her on the forearm. “If you really . . . rule it out completely . . . we probably ought to hang out with different people . . . .”
She didn’t say she ruled anything out. She did change the subject.
“So why didn’t they take Hood when he pulled in? Was it like they thought . . .”
A half-dozen detectives and the FBI agent were waiting in the surveillance apartment when Lucas and Lily arrived. Del took them aside. He was wide-awake.
“Okay. Talked to Daniel, we all agreed. We wait until the baker leaves for his job. He leaves at seven-thirty, twenty minutes of eight, something like that.”
Lucas glanced at his watch. Six-twenty.
“The other guy, the lifter, we can’t tell when he leaves,” Del continued. “The super says that some days he’s out of there by nine, other days he sleeps ’til noon. We can’t wait that long. We figure that if Hood comes in at six, he’s probably pretty beat. Maybe driving all night. Anyway, there’s a good chance he’s asleep. So we call it this way: We go in and cut their phone, just in case somebody else in the building is with them. Then we put an entry team in the hall, four guys, and stick a microphone on the door. Listen awhile. See who’s up. Then, when the baker opens the door to come out, we grab him and boom—we’re in.”
“Jesus, if Hood’s awake and has the gun handy . . .”
“He’d hardly have time to get at it,” Del said confidently. “You know that Jack Dionosopoulos guy, that big Greek with the ERU? Used to play ball at St. Thomas?”
“Yeah.” Lucas nodded.
“He’s going in first, bare hands. If Hood’s there with a gun in his hand, we got no choice. Jack goes down and the second man takes Hood with the shotgun. If there’s no gun showing, Jack takes him down. If he can’t see him, he hits the bedroom. Just fucking jumps him, pins him. Hood’s not that big a guy . . . .”
“Fuckin’ Jack, he’s taking a chance . . . .”
“He’s all armored up. He thinks he’s back at St. Thomas.”
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “It’s your call, but it sounds like Jack might have played too long without a helmet.”
“He did it before. Same deal. Gang guy, needed him to talk. He had a gun in his belt when Jack went in. He never had a chance to pull it. Jack was on him like holy on the pope.”
“So we sit some more,” Lily said, peering through the venetian blinds at the apartment across the street.
“Not here,” Del said. “We sent your drawing of the apartment down to the ERU—they’re staging in the garage of that Amoco station three blocks up. We need you to go down there and talk to them about the apartment.”
“All right,” said Lucas. “If anything happens, call.”
“Del’s pretty sharp for this time in the morning,” Lily said on the way down to the ERU meeting.
“Uh.” Lucas glanced at her.
“He’s maybe got his nose in the evidence? He was sleeping so hard yesterday it kinda looked like a chemical crash.”
Lucas shook his head. “No coke,” he muttered.
“Something?”
Lucas shrugged. “There’re some stories,” his voice still low. “He maybe does a black beauty from time to time.”
“Like once a fuckin’ hour,” she said under her breath.
The ERU felt like a ball team. They were psyched, already on their toes, talking with the distracted air of a team already focusing on the game. The apartment diagram had been laid out on plastic board with a black marker. The Polaroid photos Lucas had shot in the apartment were Scotch-taped to one side. He spent a few minutes spotting chairs, sofas, tables, rugs.
“What kind of rug is that? Is that loose?” Dionosopoulos asked. “I don’t want to run in there and fall on my ass.”
“That’s what you did at St. Thomas,” one of the other ERU men said.
“Fuck you and all pagan Lutherans,” Dionosopoulos said casually. “What about the rug, Lucas?”
“It’s small, that’s all I can tell you. I don’t know, I’d say be careful, you could slide . . . .”
“It’s one of those old fake Persian carpets, you know, you can see the threads,” said Lily. “I think it’d slide.”
“Okay.”
“Lucas?” One of the other team members moved up. “Del just called. He sounds weird, man, but he says to get your ass back to the surveillance post. Like instantly.”
“What
do you mean, ‘weird’?” Lucas asked.
“He was whispering, man. On the radio . . .”
Del met them in the hallway outside the apartment. His eyes looked like white plastic poker chips.
“What?” asked Lucas.
“The feds are here. They’ve got an entry team on the way in.”
“What?” Lucas brushed past him into the apartment. The Minneapolis agent-in-charge was standing by the window, next to the FBI surveillance man. Both were wearing radio headsets and looking across the street.
“What the fuck is going on?” Lucas asked.
“Who are you?” the AIC asked, his voice cold.
“Davenport, lieutenant, Minneapolis Police. We’ve got this scene wrapped . . . .”
“It’s not your scene anymore, Lieutenant. If you doubt that, I suggest you call your chief—”
“We got guys on the street,” a Minneapolis surveillance man suddenly blurted. “We got guys on the street.”
“Motherfucker,” Del said, “motherfucker . . .”
Lucas looked through the slats of the venetian blind. Lily was at his shoulder. There were six men on the street, two in long coats, four in body armor. Three of the men in armor and one man in a coat were climbing the stoop into the apartment building; the other man in a coat waited at the base of the steps, while the last man in armor posted himself at the corner of the building. One of the men on the steps showed a shotgun just before going inside. The man in the coat turned and looked at the surveillance post. Kieffer.
“Oh, no, no,” Lily said, “He’s got an AVON, they’re gonna hit the door with AVONs.”
“It’ll never fall, man,” Lucas said urgently to the AIC. “The door’s a solid chunk of oak. Call them down, man, it’ll never fall.”
“What?” The AIC couldn’t sort it out, and Lily said, “The door won’t fall to AVONs.”
Lucas turned and ran out of the apartment and down the hall to the front door of the building. He could hear Del chanting, “Motherfuckers, motherfuckers . . .”