White Ghost Ridge

by Carol Coffey

  “Was that Rosenberg? I think Lee mentioned him.”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “And the second thing?”

  “A man came to Cindy’s door twice looking for Albert. The first time Cindy’s eldest daughter was home alone. Cindy had only been gone for ten minutes to drop her two younger daughters to a dance lesson, so she was scared that the man was actually staking out the house. Second time he came back the man scared her. It was the final straw. She had to ask Albert to go. Said it broke her heart.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “I planned on asking her for a description after I told her that there had been a witness to her brother’s murder. I had hoped to make the point that now that the witness wouldn’t talk, our investigation into who killed Holton and possibly her brother had stalled. I pointed over to you and, when she saw you, she took off.”

  Locklear finished his coffee and stood painfully.

  “Let’s check out and head to Sioux City. It’s a long drive. About 400 miles.”

  Mendoza stood and lifted a doughnut from a plate on their table. She shoved half of it in her mouth and rubbed the cinnamon from her fingers onto her pants.

  Locklear grimaced. “How ladylike!”

  “How sexist!” she retorted.

  They walked across the road to their motel. Inside Raymond was working the day shift and was waiting to deliver something Locklear had ordered from him.

  The drug-dealer was wearing the same pizza-stained shorts and torn T-shirt. Norma was nowhere to be seen.

  “First time I ever sold burners to a cop,” he said with a grin.

  Locklear lifted the two cell phones and switched them on.

  “They’re both working?”

  “Yes, and definitely untraceable.”

  Locklear placed a fold of money onto the counter. He threw one of the phones to Mendoza.

  “Here, disable your GPS, turn your cell off and take the battery out. Then, give the number on that cell case to your mom. Make sure she knows not to share it with anyone else.”

  He turned to walk away but then turned back quickly and suddenly grabbed Raymond by the neck and pushed him into the wall.

  “Jesus, man, take them ... for free!”

  “I pay my own way in this world, Raymond. What I want from you is your word to stop disrespecting your mother. What I mean by that is no yelling, no leaving your mother to do work that she shouldn’t be doing alone while you peddle drugs in the only home she could manage to give you. And no living off her. You pay your way. You make her life as easy as you can. I’ve asked some cop friends to check in here. Plainclothes cops. I may even be back this way and I’ll check in on her myself and you don’t want to disappoint me. So, you be nice.”

  Locklear loosened his grip from the startled man and backed away.

  Mendoza smirked.

  Back in his room, Locklear phoned Carter’s father. He said his name, told Seth Carter to get the number to his son and hung up.

  When the two arrived back at reception with their keys, Raymond was scrubbing urine from the floor tiles with a brush.

  Locklear threw his luggage into the trunk and grappled with Mendoza’s case to lift it in too.

  “I got it, sarge,” she said.

  They got into the car.

  “That was nice, what you did for Norma there,” Mendoza said. “You’re a good man, Locklear – but don’t worry – I won’t tell anyone at the station. Your dirty little secret is safe with me.”

  Locklear turned on the ignition and signalled out of the lot.

  “Thought you were crap at technology? How’d you know so much about burner phones?”

  “I learn what I have to, Mendoza.”

  “Why can’t we fly?”

  Locklear looked at his watch. It was only a little after 11am.

  “Next flight to Sioux City is probably not until tomorrow morning. That’s a day wasted when we could have already been where we want to go. Time is running out for Lee, Mendoza. I can feel it.”

  Chapter 10

  Mendoza remained silent until Locklear drove out of Rapid City and swung right onto Highway 14 heading eastwards. She could feel her boss visibly relax as he nestled into the driver’s seat and stared silently at the grey expanse of road ahead of him. Soon the road became empty save for a few truckers heading east or pulling into large diners scattered along the isolated roadway. They passed a road sign which said ‘Sioux City 340 miles’. The silence in the car was beginning to grate on the young cop’s nerves.

  “Jeez, sarge. We better think of something to talk about or at least put the radio on.”

  “I can’t think if the radio is on,” Locklear snapped back.

  Mendoza sighed and looked out of the window as they passed the turn-off for Box Elder and wondered what kind of place the small town was. She tapped her long nails onto the dash and tried to occupy her mind by reading the dozens of billboards that littered the highway. She knew better than to ask her boss if it had been hard for him being back in the town where he had been born and where she knew his mother had died, although the details of the woman’s death and what passed between mother and son in those last few months remained unknown to her. Locklear’s past was a closed book and the only information she learnt about him and what he had been through was gleaned from how he interacted with the world, how he hated bullies like Raymond and how protective he was of her. All she knew about her boss’s mother was her first name: Wachiwi. She could easily imagine how he had been with his mother when she was alive, that he had been a good son. She wondered if Wachiwi had been a good mother to him in return but something told her that this had not been the case.

  “Did your mother have an Indian name as well as the name Locklear? You know, like Albert did?”

  “Huh?”

  “I know her first name was Wachiwi and that’s native, right? But Locklear, that doesn’t sound native, does it? I wonder if she also had an Indian last name?”

  “Mendoza!” Locklear warned.

  “OK, OK!” she replied, putting her hands up in mock surrender. “I just wondered.”

  The emptiness of the road did not alter with the exception of large trailer parks dotted along the highway.

  “Can I ask one more question, sarge?”

  Locklear shook his head but his subordinate persevered.

  “Was Locklear your father’s name?”

  Locklear waited a while before answering. Mendoza watched him as his mouth moved silently, obviously formulating an answer that he was comfortable with. He came up with nothing.

  “I don’t know. I never found a birth cert or a marriage cert for my mother. Things were different then. Records weren’t kept like they are now, especially in her ... community.”

  “One more question?”

  “You said that was your last one, Mendoza.”

  “I know but ... do you think your father ... well, do you think he was white?”

  “What do you think?” Locklear barked.

  Mendoza tensed at the tone of Locklear’s voice. She had obviously hit a nerve. She looked at her boss and took in his deep brown eyes, his thick, black straight hair which always looked like it needed to be cut and his light-brown skin which was no darker than the skin of any white man who spent time in the summer sunshine.

  “I think he was white,” she whispered.

  Locklear made no response.

  “Would it bother you if he was?”

  Silence.

  Mendoza knew that would be all she’d get out of him and that pushing any further could possibly anger her boss.

  They passed the turn-off for 173rd Avenue which amused Mendoza. “Not sure why they name these ‘turn-offs’. There’s damn all here to turn off for.”

  “Do you have to use bad language, Mendoza?”

  “You say damn all the time.”

  “Well, that’s different.”

  “Why? Because I’m a woman? Didn’t your mother ever cuss?”

/>   “No. She didn’t.”

  The terrain changed a little, revealing small hills on either side of the motorway and the incline of bigger hills in the distance. The land looked drier and the heat rose up from the asphalt in silvery waves.

  “Can we stop for some water?”

  Locklear nodded. “There’s a small place called Wasta a few miles up. I’ll pull in there.”

  “You travel this road a lot, sarge?”

  “Few times,” he replied.

  He signalled and turned off the road, pulling roughly up in front of a convenience store in the tiny dot that was Wasta.

  Mendoza bought a coffee and some water while Locklear filled the car with gas. She wandered around and looked out into the rising heat.

  “I could never live anywhere like this, sarge. It’d kill me. I mean, what do people do all day?”

  Locklear scanned the small outpost which consisted of a service station, gift store and a small convenience store. A tiny post office which looked like an afterthought was in an old house at the end of the row. To Locklear, the place looked like peace.

  They drove back onto the road and crossed the Cheyenne River. A sign told Mendoza that Sioux City was now only 303 miles away and a town called Badlands 11 miles. They passed the town of Wall which was slightly larger but no less unimpressive than Wasta was.

  Badlands was nothing more than a trading post and a camping area which no-one appeared to be using.

  “Why is it called Badlands?” Mendoza asked

  “It was translated from the Lakota language meaning the land was poor. It’s dry here. There’s little water, hence the name.”

  “Did your mother teach you that?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know it?”

  “I told you before, I was a cop in Rapid City for a while. Sometimes we’d be handling a case that originated in the city but trailed back to one of the reservations. We’d have to come out and speak to the tribal cops. I got to know some of them well.”

  “Did they ever ask about you being part native?”

  “Does every Hispanic person you meet ask you about being Mexican?”

  “Well no, but this is different.”

  “How?”

  “It just is. I mean, you might have found out something about your mother.”

  Locklear made no reply.

  “Didn’t you ever bring it up?”

  “No. Look, my mother could have been from anywhere. Look at this land. There are dozens of reservations here, if she was even from SD. I don’t know. It’s a big country.”

  “So the tribal cops, they didn’t notice?”

  “Mendoza, will you goddamn well drop it?”

  Mendoza got the message and sulked for a moment in the passenger seat until she spotted the turn-off for a town called Kadoka.

  “I’m starving,” she said.

  “Mendoza, seriously, how are you so skinny? We just ate breakfast.”

  “Two hours ago,” she pleaded.

  Locklear signalled and took the off-ramp.

  They settled into a red faux-leather seat in the nearest diner and ate wordlessly. Mendoza paid despite Locklear’s protests at the cashier’s desk.

  “You don’t always have to pay, you know,” she said as they settled back into the car to drive the last leg of the journey.

  Mendoza tensed up and held onto the roof as they drove over the huge, clear water of the Missouri River.

  “What’s the matter?” Locklear asked.

  “Nothing. I can’t swim so I always get nervous driving over water.”

  As they passed Chamberlain airport followed by Kimball municipal airport, Mendoza turned to Locklear.

  “That’s three airports in all that I’ve seen on this journey. I’m sure we could have flown here.”

  “I don’t want to use our cards any more than we have to. We’ll use cash as much as possible from here on. We don’t know who’s involved in this case or how big it is. Someone might be keeping an eye on our travel plans. The road is safer and it’s easier to get away fast if we need to.”

  “You’re really expecting trouble on this one, aren’t you?”

  Locklear did not answer.

  Mendoza fell quiet as they travelled silently through the towns of Pierre, Huron and Iroquois. The names were so exotic to her yet she could see the poverty in the towns, the deprivation. She glanced at Locklear several times but he was looking straight ahead.

  They drove by the town of De Smet. She grinned at the billboard advertising tours of the homeplace of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

  “Guess you don’t want to stop and take in a tour of our country’s history of white settlement?” she said with a laugh.

  “Doubt it,” Locklear replied and smiled.

  It was the first time she had seen her boss smile all day.

  “You know, one of my aunts was convinced that our family had very little Spanish blood and that, apart from one or two more recent intermarriages, we were Aztecs and part of the indigenous people known as Tlaxcaltecs. A few years back she did a DNA test. When the results came back she discovered that we were 91% Spanish with very little actual native blood. I remember that she was upset for weeks.”

  Mendoza laughed. Locklear didn’t.

  “Your point?” he asked.

  “Well, I guess my point is that my ancestors were colonialists. God knows what shit they did when they arrived in South America. My point is that it was so long ago, really, so does it matter now? Doesn’t change who we are now, does it?”

  Locklear looked out at the rundown clapboards and empty streets of Iroquois. Outside of the wooden convenience store, two Native men stood on the porch, side by side, passing the time by looking at the farmland across the road that their ancestors had probably once owned.

  “It only wouldn’t matter if we were all equal now, Mendoza.”

  Together they drove on through Arlington and came to the end of the E14 in the town of Brookings where they took a right onto 29, crossing the Big Sioux River. When they finally arrived at the outskirts of Sioux City, Mendoza looked at the clock on the dash which read 5.45pm.

  “Took longer than you thought,” she said.

  “I didn’t factor in stopping for lunch. Or coffee.”

  “Jeez, sorry for being human and needing food. Speaking of which ...”

  “I want to catch Lewis before he closes up his store for the day. Then, we can eat.”

  “Couple of beers wouldn’t go astray.”

  “Do what you want then, Mendoza. I’ll just eat.”

  Locklear drove more slowly as he searched for the exit for 77. They exited and then drove on to Western Parkway. He crossed Hamilton Boulevard and turned onto Myrtle Street which was a long winding road full of retail outlets and small speciality stores.

  The fishing store was located at the very end of the street beside a closed cell-phone store. Locklear parked on the opposite side of the road and watched a tall, lean black man in his mid-thirties carry fishing supplies into the store as he prepared to close for the day.

  Ex-Private Patrick Lewis walked with a slight limp and still wore an army buzz cut. His body looked toned and fit under his expensive Stone Island T-shirt and Cavelli jeans. Lewis looked like a man who looked after himself but there was something about his movements that told Locklear the man had not been born into money and that he wore his wealth with the disdain of someone from humble beginnings. Locklear scanned the parking lot which was empty except for a red Ford F-150 Lariat which was parked right outside Lewis’s store.

  “Well, shall we do this one together?” Locklear asked.

  Mendoza looked Lewis up and down and tried to form her opinion of what kind of interviewee he would be. She decided that interviewing Lewis warranted a team approach.

  “Together,” she replied.

  Locklear got out of the car and waited for Mendoza to join him. He knew by the look on Lewis’s face that he knew they weren’t looking for fish bait.

/>   Lewis glanced nervously around him, lifted the last of the equipment from the pavement and walked inside.

  He stood to one side to let them in and pulled the metal shutter down.

  “Looks like you were expecting us. Did Cindy Geddis phone you?”

  Lewis nodded.

  “So, you know we’re looking into her brother’s murder?”

  “I saw it in the newspaper. I heard it was suicide.”

  “Is that what you believe?” Mendoza asked.

  Lewis looked around his store and set his eyes on the rows of fishing rods lined up against the wall of his small business.

  “Doesn’t matter what I think. It’s what I know that matters and what I know is that you have no jurisdiction here.”

  “Albert was your friend. Thought you might like to help put his killer behind bars.”

  Lewis glared at the cop and pulled his lips into a fine line.

  Locklear walked to the wall and looked at a photo of Lewis fishing on a boat with an older black man. A photo beside it showed the same man looking younger and wearing a military uniform.

  “This your dad?”

  Lewis nodded. “He lives for fishing. We spend almost every moment we get on the Missouri River.

  “What do you fish for?” Locklear replied, feigning interest in an activity he had never done and had no inclination to ever try.

  “Mostly wall eye.”

  “I see your dad served in the army.”