John Sandford

by Shadow Prey

  CHAPTER

  17

  Two pickups and a car with a Sioux Falls television logo were angle-parked outside the all-night coffee shop. A single man in a cowboy hat sat in a window booth, hunched over a cup of coffee and a grilled-cheese sandwich. Lucas hesitated outside the window, looking in, then followed Lily through the door.

  “Checking for Jennifer?” she asked with a small smile.

  Lucas blushed. “Well, it’d be better if she weren’t . . .”

  “Sure.” He followed her down the row of booths, watching her hips. She’d changed from slacks to a dress and low heels. She still carried the shoulder bag with the .45.

  The waitress, a tired young woman with vagrant strands of black hair dangling in her face, took their order of cheeseburgers and coffee and slouched away.

  “What do you think about this Crows business?” Lily asked while they waited for the food.

  “I don’t know. Larry sounded weird. And shit, I was talking to this other guy, this Shadow Love. I knew at the time there was something not right about him. He . . . vibrated, you know?”

  “Fruitcake?”

  “There was something wrong. I don’t know.” The coffee came, scalding hot, oily.

  There was nothing like the Minneapolis Indian community in New York, Lily said. Indians were there, all right, but weren’t as visible. “They look kind of . . . mysterious,” she said. “You see them on the street, on the corners. They’re not threatening, not hostile. They just seem to watch . . . .”

  Lucas nodded. “Sometimes they’re like the biggest upcountry Scandinavian redneck shitkickers in the world. They bang around in old pickups and work in the lumber business or ranching. Then other times you’ll be out fuckin’ around somewhere and you’ll come across a bunch of Indians doing a ceremony. It looks like a tourist thing, but it’s not. It’s real . . . .”

  They talked for an hour. Lucas at one point decided he was babbling. On the way back to the motel, in the car, they spoke almost not at all. Lucas parked behind the motel and locked the car.

  “Think they’ll know anything?” she asked as they walked down the hall toward their rooms.

  “Maybe. We can call.”

  “Come on in. We can call from my room.” She pushed the door open and Lucas followed her inside. She gestured at the phone, and he sat on the bed, picked up the receiver and dialed. Daniel answered on the first ring.

  “Chief: Lucas. What happened?”

  “We went in, but we missed them,” Daniel said. “They’re the right guys, though. There were a couple of press releases balled up and tossed in a garbage bag under the sink and the typewriter’s right . . .”

  “They left the typewriter?”

  “Yeah. Sloan’s down there, with Del, and they say it’s kind of odd. They left a lot of junk behind, but the personal stuff is gone. Sloan thinks they blew out of the place in a hurry—maybe when they heard that Liss wasn’t dead. Figured he might talk.”

  “Are you talking to the neighbors?”

  “Yeah. Nobody saw them much. They are two old Indians, though. And they left prints all over the place, the FBI’s running them now. And somebody said they drove a truck, and that’s still parked out front . . . .”

  “Jesus. Maybe you ought to shut down the scene and watch it, maybe they’ll be back . . . .”

  “We’re doing that, but Del doesn’t think it’ll work. He says word’ll be up and down the street in an hour, about the raid.”

  “That’s probably right,” Lucas said. “Damn.”

  “We’ll talk to you tomorrow—we ought to have everything figured out by then. We’ll meet at one o’clock, if you can make it.”

  “We’ll be there,” Lucas said. He hung up and turned to Lily, shaking his head. “Missed them.”

  “But they’re the right guys?”

  “Yeah, they left some stuff behind. They got a definite ID.”

  “God damn it,” Lily said irritably. She dropped her head and reached back with one hand and rubbed her neck. She was less than a foot away and Lucas could smell the elusive scent she’d worn the first day he’d met her.

  “How much longer are we going to fool around?” he asked quietly.

  “I’m all done,” she said.

  “Say what? You’re all done?”

  “Yeah.” She stood and stepped across the room. Lucas started after her, but she reached the lights, snapped them off and then stepped back into the dark, her arms crossed in front of her breasts.

  “I’m really scared,” she said.

  “Jesus.” He wrapped her tightly with his left arm, caught the back of her neck in his right hand and pulled her face to his. The kiss locked them together, swaying, for ten seconds; then she pulled her chin back, gasping, and they stumbled sideways together and fell on the bed.

  “Lucas, dammit, give me a minute in the shower . . . .”

  “Fuck the shower,” he said. His voice was coarse, fevered. He kissed her again, his body pressing her into the bed, one hand tugging at the buttons that held the top of her dress together.

  “Jesus, let me . . .”

  “I got it.” A button popped and his hand was on her warm skin, her stomach, then around behind, unlatching her brassiere. Lily began to moan, trying to catch his lips. They rolled across the bed, she fumbling with his belt, he with his hand now beneath her dress, pulling at her underpants.

  “My God, a garter belt, what’s it made out of, steel mesh? I can’t . . .”

  “Slow down, slow down . . . .”

  “No.”

  He got the garter belt off one leg, though it was still twisted around her ankle, and then her underpants were off one leg, and his hands were on her. Finally he entered her and she nearly screamed with the intensity of the feeling . . . and sometime later, she thought, she did scream.

  “Christ, I wish I still smoked,” he said. He’d turned on a bedside lamp and was sitting up, still mostly dressed. She was gasping for air. Like a carp, she thought. She’d never seen one, but had read in good books about carp gasping for air on riverbanks. He looked down at her. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. My God . . .”

  “Can I . . . let me take some of this stuff . . .”

  After the violence of the first episode, he was suddenly tender, moving her body, lifting her, stripping off her remaining clothing. She felt almost like a child, until he kissed her on the front of her thigh, just where it joined her hip, and the fire ran through her belly again and she gasped. Lucas was on her again and the bedside lamp seemed to grow dimmer. Then again, after a while, she thought, she may have screamed again.

  “Did I scream?” she blurted. She stood facing the shower head, the water beating off her breasts. Lucas stood behind her. She could feel him pressing against her buttocks, his soapy hand on her stomach.

  “I don’t know. I thought it was me,” he said.

  She giggled. “What are you doing?”

  “Just washing.”

  “I think you already washed there.”

  “A little more couldn’t hurt.”

  She closed her eyes and leaned back against him, his soapy hand moving, and it started once again . . . .

  CHAPTER

  18

  Barbara Gow’s house had gray siding, once white, and a red asbestos-shingle roof. A single box elder stood in the front yard and a swayback garage hunkered hopelessly in back. A waist-high chain-link fence surrounded her holdings.

  “It looks pretty bad,” she said sadly. They were ten minutes off the expressway, in a neighborhood of tired yards. The postwar frame houses were crumbling from age, poor quality and neglect: roofs were missing shingles, eaves showed patches of dry rot. In the dim illumination of the streetlights, they could see kids’ bikes dumped unceremoniously on the weedy lawns. The cars parked in the streets were exhausted hulks. Oil stains marked the driveways like Rorschachs of failure.

  “When I bought it, I called it a cottage,” she said as they rolled into the driveway. �
��God damn, it makes me sad. To think you can live in a place for thirty years, and in the end, not care about it.”

  Sam Crow closed one eye and stared at her with the other, gauging the level of her unhappiness. In the end, he grunted, got out of the car and lifted the garage door.

  “I hope Shadow Love’s okay,” she said anxiously as she pulled into the garage.

  She had picked them up ten minutes after Sam called her. As they headed back to her house, they crossed the street that the apartment was on. There were cars in the street. Cops. The raid was under way.

  “He was due back,” Sam said as they got out of the car. “With all those cops in the street . . .”

  “If he wasn’t there when they arrived . . .”

  “If they didn’t get him, we should be hearing from him,” said Aaron.

  Barbara’s house was musty. She was never a housekeeper, and she smoked: the interior, once bright, was overlaid with a yellowing patina of tobacco tar. Sam Crow dragged the duffel bag up the stairs. Aaron headed for a sitting room that had a foldout couch.

  “You guys got any money?” Barbara asked when Sam came back down.

  “A couple of hundred,” he said, shrugging.

  “I’ll need help with the groceries if you stay here long.”

  “Shouldn’t be too long. A week, maybe.”

  Twenty minutes later, Shadow Love called. Barbara said, “Yes, they’re here. They’re okay,” and handed the phone to Sam.

  “We were afraid they got you,” Sam said.

  “I almost walked right into them,” Shadow Love said. He was in a bar six blocks from the Crows’ apartment. “I was thinking about something else, I was almost on the block when I realized something was wrong, with all those cars. I watched for a while, I was worried I’d see them taking you out.”

  “You coming here?” Sam asked.

  “I better. I don’t know where they got their information, but if they’re tracking me . . . I’ll see you in a half-hour.”

  When Shadow Love arrived, Barbara stood on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek and took him straight into the kitchen for a sandwich.

  “Somebody betrayed us,” Shadow Love said. “That fuckin’ Hart was in the street outside the apartment. He’s passing out money now. The hunter cop too.”

  “We’re not doing as well as I hoped,” Sam confessed. “I’d hoped Billy would get at least one more and that John would make it out of Brookings . . . .”

  “Leo’s still out and I’m available,” Shadow Love said. “And you can’t complain about the media. Christ, they’re all over the goddamned Midwest. I saw a thing on television from Arizona, people out on the reservations there, talking . . . .”

  “So it’s working,” Aaron said, looking at his cousin.

  “For now, anyway,” Sam said.

  Later that night, Sam watched Barbara move around the bedroom and thought, She’s old.

  Sixty, anyway. Two years younger than he was. He remembered her from the early fifties, the Ojibway bohemian student of French existentialists, her dark hair pulled back in a bun, her fresh heart-shaped face without makeup, her books in a green cloth sack carried over her shoulder. Her beret. She wore a crimson beret, pulled down over one eye, smoked Gauloises and Gitanes and sometimes Players, and talked about Camus.

  Barbara Gow had grown up on the Iron Range, the product of an Ojibway father and a Serbian mother. Her father worked in the open-pit mines during the day and for the union at night. Her mother’s Bible sat in a small bookcase in the living room. Next to it was her father’s Das Kapital.

  As a teenager, she had done clerical work for the union. After her mother died, leaving a small insurance policy, she’d moved to Minneapolis and started at the university. She liked the university and the talk, the theory. She liked it better when she heard the news from existential France.

  Sam could still see all of that in her, behind the wrinkled face and slumping shoulders. She shivered nude in the cold air and pulled on a housecoat, then turned and smiled at him, the smile lighting his heart.

  “I’m surprised that thing still works, much as you abuse it,” she said. Sam’s penis curled comfortably on his pelvis. It felt happy, he thought.

  “It’ll always work for you,” Sam said. He lay on top of the blankets, on top of the handmade quilt, impervious to the cold.

  She laughed and left the room, and a moment later he heard the water start in the bathroom. Sam lay on the bed, wishing he could stay for a year or two years or five, wrapped in the quilt. Scared. That’s what it was, he thought. He put the thought out of his mind, rolled off the bed and walked to the bathroom. Barbara was sitting on the toilet. He stepped in front of the vanity and turned on the water to wash himself.

  “Shadow Love’s still watching that movie,” Barbara said. The sounds of TV gunfire drifted up the stairs.

  “Zulu,” said Sam. “Big fight in Africa, a hundred years ago. He says it was better than the Custer fight.”

  Barbara stood up and flushed the toilet as Sam dried himself with a towel. “Is this the end?” she asked quietly as they walked back into the bedroom.

  He knew what she meant, but pretended he did not. “The end?”

  “Don’t give me any bullshit. Are you going to die?”

  He shrugged. “Shadow Love says so.”

  “Then you will,” Barbara said. “Unless you go away. Now.”

  Sam shook his head. “Can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “The thing is, these other people have died. If it comes my turn and I don’t fight, it’ll be like I turned my back on them.”

  “You’ve got a gun?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And this is all necessary?”

  “Yes. And it’s almost necessary that we . . . die. The people need this story. You know, when we were kids, I knew people who rode with Crazy Horse. Who’s alive now to talk to the kids? The only legends they have are dope dealers . . . .”

  “So you’re ready.”

  “No, of course not,” Sam admitted. “When I think about dying . . . I can’t think about dying. I’m not ready.”

  “Nobody ever is,” Barbara said. “I look at myself in the mirror, on the door . . .” She pushed the bedroom door shut, and the full-length mirror mounted on the back reflected the two of them, naked, looking into it. “ . . . and I see this old woman, shriveled up like last year’s potato. A clerk at the historical society, all gray and bent over. But I feel like I’m eighteen. I want to go out and run in the park with the wind in my hair, and I want to roll around on the grass with you and Aaron and hear Aaron putting the bullshit on me, trying to get into my pants . . . and I can’t do any of that because I’m old. And I’m going to die. I don’t want to be old and I don’t want to die, but I will . . . . I’m not ready, but I’m going.”

  “I’m glad we had this talk,” Sam said wryly. “It really cheered me up.”

  She sighed. “Yeah. Well, the way you talk, I think when the time comes, you’ll use the gun.”

  Shadow Love paced.

  Sam lay at Barbara’s right hand, asleep, his breathing deep and easy, but all during the night Barbara could hear Shadow Love pacing the length of the downstairs hallway. The television came on, was turned off, came on again. More pacing. He’d always been like that.

  Almost forty years earlier, Barbara had lived a half block from Rosie Love, and had met the Crows at her house. They had been radical hard-cases even then, smoking cigarettes all night, drinking, talking about the BIA cops and the FBI and what they were doing on the reservations.

  When Shadow was born, Barbara was the godmother. In her mind’s eye, she could still see Shadow Love walking the city sidewalks in his cheap shorts and undersize striped polo shirt, his pale eyes calculating the world around him. Even as a child, he had had the fire. He was never the biggest kid on the block, but none of the other kids fooled with him. Shadow Love was electric. Shadow Love was crazy. Barbara loved him as she would her own ch
ild, and she lay in her bed and listened to him pace. She looked at the clock at 3:35, and then she drifted off to sleep.

  In the morning, she found him sitting, asleep, in the big chair in the living room, the chair she once called her mantrap. She tiptoed past the doorway toward the kitchen, and his voice called to her as she passed: “Don’t sneak.”

  “I thought you were asleep,” she said. She stepped back to the doorway. He was on his feet. Light was coming in the window behind him and he loomed in it, a dark figure with a halo.

  “I was, for a while.” He yawned and stretched. “Is this house wired for cable?”

  “Yeah, I got it for a while. But when there was nothing on, I had them turn it off.”

  “How about if I give you the money and you have them turn it back on? HBO or Cinemax or Showtime. Maybe all of them. When the heat gets heavy, we’ll really be cooped up.”

  “I’ll call them this morning,” she said.

  At midmorning, after breakfast, Barbara got a stool, a towel and a pair of scissors and cut Sam’s and Shadow Love’s hair. Aaron sat and watched in amusement as the hair fell in black wisps around their shoulders and onto the floor. He told Sam that when old men get their hair cut, they lose their potency.

  “Nothin’ wrong with my dick,” Sam said. “Ask Barb.” He tried to slap her on the butt. She dodged his hand and Shadow Love flinched. “Watch it, God damn it, you’re going to stick the scissors in my ear.”

  When she finished, Shadow Love put on a long-sleeved cowboy shirt, sunglasses and a baseball cap.

  “I still look pretty fuckin’ Indian, don’t I?”

  “Get rid of the sunglasses,” Barbara said. “Your eyes could pass for blue. You could be a tanned white man.”

  “I could use some ID,” Shadow Love said, tossing the sunglasses on the kitchen table.

  “Just a minute,” Barbara said. She went upstairs and came back a few minutes later with a man’s billfold, all flat and tired and shaped to another butt. “It was my brother’s,” she said. “He died two years ago.”