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 lot 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.
“My
grandfather.”
“Small world.” Manny
read her questioning look. “I used to work for him when he was
police chief.”
“And you
are?”
“Manny
Tanno.”
She sucked in a quick
breath. “Grandfather always talks about you. He was always proud
that you left here and made good.”
“How is Chief
Horn?”
“He retired years
ago.” She dropped her eyes. “He fell in love with White
Clay.”
Unc always warned
Manny to avoid White Clay. “Some of your young buddies will find
their way down there,” he told Manny on the day he got his driver’s
license. “Just as their parents did and their parents before them.
But don’t you fall for that. Nothing good will ever come out of
drinking.”
White Clay sat just
across the Nebraska border within walking distance of Pine Ridge
Village and, since the sale of alcohol was illegal on the
reservation, most Indians went there for liquor. The store owners
bragged that Pine Ridge made millions for them. A recent mutual aid
agreement between the tribe and Nebraska allowed Oglala Sioux
Tribal Police to cross the state line, but short of making alcohol
legal on the reservation, nothing would change.
Given all the years
Chief Horn had worked as a lawman and seen the effects of alcohol
on Lakota lives, Manny couldn’t understand how the chief could
succumb to the lure of the bottle.
“He went the way so
many of our people do.” Shannon swallowed hard, and her eyes
watered. She dried them with the back of her hand. Nothing Manny
said could help. It was that same desperation that had shone in the
eyes of Oglala men and women when he had lived here; resignation
sapped their will. He damned Ben Niles again for ordering him back
here.
He changed the
subject and asked for Chief Spotted Horse.
“Chief Spotted Horse
had an accident. Lieutenant Looks Twice is in charge while the
chief is on sick leave. He’s expecting you.”
“Lumpy made
lieutenant?”
“Pardon?”
He shook his
head.
She buzzed him
through the door, and he followed her through the outer office. She
glanced sideways at Manny and wrinkled her nose. Some of the
younger agents said his cologne smelled like old feet. But he liked
it.
Officers in black
Oglala Sioux Tribal uniforms looked up from computers, but Manny
was certain no one recognized him. At five-foot-eight he cast an
unimposing shadow, and his paunch and thinning hair with its
distinct widow’s peak poking through was typical here. Only his
khakis and the cuff links on his ivory shirt set him apart. Of
course no one had seen him on CNN last year investigating that
double homicide at Standing Rock, or on FOX when he solved that
infanticide in Crow Creek. It had been so long since he had been
back to Pine Ridge, even his renown didn’t betray him. It was his
plainness that dropped people’s guard. His plainness allowed them
to trust him even when they shouldn’t, and people often trusted him
with that small piece of information that would convict
them.
He spent ten active
years in Violent Crime in Chicago before Ben Niles wooed him out of
the field and into an academy teaching slot. Manny was slow to
admit it, but he might just enjoy being back in the field until the
next academy class began. He just wished it was someplace besides
Pine Ridge.
Shannon motioned to
the lieutenant’s office.
“Lieutenant Looks
Twice must have stepped out. Can I get you a cup of
coffee?”
“Thanks.”
By the time she
returned, Manny had settled into a large, padded velvet Elvis
chair. The King, guitar in hand, hips gyrating, smiled at him from
the chair’s cushion. It was almost a shame to sit on him, but Manny
did, and the chair swallowed him in its comfort. He smiled. This
was the first time he had ever sat upon a velvet Elvis, and he
tilted his head back as Shannon walked away.
He resisted the urge
to prop his feet on the desktop, even though his feet couldn’t be
any more insulting to the desk than age had been. Lumpy had been a
tribal policeman for twenty-five years, working himself up to the
rank of lieutenant. His desk should have represented his
accomplishments, should have projected a symbol of his success. At
any other agency even a rookie would have been ashamed to have that
piece of trash belittling him every day.
It was only Lumpy’s
desk. But Manny felt sadness for him.
A cheap-motel-room
Charles Russell print hung on one wall, next to a spiderwebbed
photo of a young Leon Looks Twice. He wore his finest Western duds:
a shirt with pearl buttons and a Stetson placed at the obligatory
rakish angle. Manny strained to recall him as a young officer.
Lumpy had always taken a liking to stars of the Western screen—John
Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Ben Johnson—and had fancied himself looking
like those old greats. A real Hopalong Lumpy.
On the opposite wall
hung a picture of him that Manny remembered best. Lumpy stood in a
sharply pressed Oglala Sioux Tribal Police uniform with arms
crossed. His eyes projected the look of a bully who scratched a
line in the sand and dared anyone to cross it. Those eyes seemed to
follow Manny as he checked out the rest of the office.
Behind Manny, two
pictures framed in gold leaf were perched on a Catholic Bible on a
shelf. He got out of the chair to look at Desirée Chasing Hawk in
her white lace wedding dress. Lumpy hugged her, looking too short
and too fat in his tux. Manny heard they got married after he left
for Quantico. Manny and Lumpy had courted Desirée all through high
school. But Lumpy had always impressed girls with his flamboyant
clothes and extravagant gifts, and he had wooed and won
her.
In another gilded
frame, Desirée straddled a bicycle. A short skirt caressed shapely
legs, and a low blouse revealed what Manny never had. She smiled
into the camera, and his heart raced for a moment, old feelings
returning.
“That was taken the
summer before Desirée left me.”
Lumpy blocked the
doorway. He stood with his hands on pudgy hips, black hair slicked
back. “She stayed beautiful until the day she ran off with that
siding salesman from Wisconsin.”
“What
happened?”
“She always had the
roving eye. You know, it’s supposed to be the man that sleeps
around. She was on the make before our first anniversary. I wish to
hell you’d have walked down the aisle with her instead of
me.”
“And some siding
salesman lured her away?”
Lumpy smiled. “He
owned seventeen siding companies in the West and Midwest. Worth
millions. He promised her a future in acting.”
“She ever
act?”
“Just in his company
commercials.”
“Well, she must be
happy with him and his millions.”
Lumpy’s grin faded.
“It didn’t last. She and her prenup moved back after a couple of
years. Took back her own name just to spite me.”
“Ever see
her?”
The grin returned.
“Once in a while.”
Manny looked at
Desirée with regret, turned to Lumpy, and offered his hand. Manny
wasn’t a tall man, but he felt six feet next to Lumpy. “Been quite
a while, Lumpy.”
“It’s ‘Lieutenant
Looks Twice’ now.”
“I’ll remember that.”
His little-man attitude snatched Manny back twenty-five years. He
was fresh out of the army, working as a tribal cop with a
roly-poly, beside-himself rookie the others called “Lumpy” for the
lumps of fat sticking out from under his duty belt. Now, he looked
twice as lumpy. Manny wanted to laugh out loud. Lump Lump. “So
you’re in charge while the chief’s on sick leave.”
Lumpy grinned. “Chief
Spotted Horse got thrown from his spotted horse and broke his
leg.”
“You don’t sound too
broke up over it.”
Lumpy shrugged.
“Let’s just say I’m the chief-in-training while he’s out. That’s
why I got the call this morning that you were coming here to assume
the Red Cloud investigation.” Lumpy ran his hand through his thick
hair. “We already began an investigation, and Pat Pourier’s already
processed the crime scene. Contrary to your boss’s opinion, we’re
no rubes here. But I got ordered to remand the investigation to the
FBI. I figure it would take something high-profile like Jason Red
Cloud’s murder to pry the legendary Special Agent Manny Tanno from
his cushy academy job.”
Manny wanted to tell
Lumpy that he had little say in the matter. With two years until
retirement, Manny couldn’t refuse any request of the agent in
charge. Manny had not wanted this investigation, didn’t want to
come back to Pine Ridge, but Ben Niles insisted.
“Besides, the press
will expect Manny Tanno to investigate it. Demand it.”
“I’m not
going.”
“Sure you
are.”
“Piss on
you.”
“I got faith in you.
You’ve solved every homicide you’ve ever worked in the bureau. The
media’s screaming for a suspect, and you’ll have this wrapped up by
the time the next academy class starts two weeks from now.” Niles
smirked. “Besides, Jason Red Cloud’s a household
name.”
Manny agreed, but he
wouldn’t admit it to Niles. The papers called Jason Red Cloud the
“Donald Trump of the West,” with holdings and developments from
Denver to Minneapolis, Sun Valley to Salt Lake. Jason had been a
hometown celebrity, an Oglala who made good, and Niles insisted
this was one Pine Ridge homicide that had to be
solved.
Two weeks wasn’t much
time to conduct an investigation on hostile ground. Lakota or no,
the Oglala Sioux were distrustful of federal authorities. The
government’s subjugation of them went back to the repressive
policies of the mid- to late-1800s, when the government’s word was
freely given and just as freely broken, when treaties were flamed
the moment they were signed, and when the great Sioux Nation was
reduced to land one-sixth the size of the agreed-upon
acreage.
“Maybe I asked for
this assignment because I missed you so much, Lumpy.” Lumpy’s face
flushed, and he balled his fist up beside his leg. “But now you say
it’s ‘Lieutenant Looks Twice.’ I’ll remember that.”
The years of rivalry
as kids, the tension between them as tribal cops, returned in this
one moment. Lumpy glared at Manny, and Manny took the bait, playing
a juvenile game of stare down. Finally Lumpy blinked and bellowed
to the dispatcher, “Where the hell’s Willie?”
In the parking lot a
car door slammed, and an officer burst through the door. He ran
into the room just as Lumpy stared at Manny again, demanding a
rematch. The young policeman walked directly to Manny and held out
his hand.
“This is Willie With
Horn.”
“William,” Willie
corrected.
Lumpy ignored him.
“Willie here’s your, shall we say, liaison officer while you’re
here on Pine Ridge. He’ll be assisting in your investigation. Feel
free to use his vast expertise. His innumerable contacts.” He
winked at Manny. “I handpicked him myself.”
Manny ignored Lumpy
as he eyed the young tribal officer towering over him. Willie was
uncommonly heavy in the chest and shoulders and hadn’t yet
developed the paunch that identified him as a Lakota. He would be
right at home handling any bar fight or family dispute, but he was
young. Manny had expected to work with a veteran, since Niles
wanted the case wrapped up in two weeks. Manny could have asked for
someone else, but William threw off good vibes, and Manny often
relied on his intuition.
“Fine. Officer With
Horn will do just fine.”
Lumpy’s smile faded.
He walked around the desk, sat, and propped his feet up. His
ostrich boots, so big that they hung over the desk, made him look
like a caricature. He strained his short arms to reach into his top
desk drawer and tossed a folder on the desktop. “Crime scene
photos, Hotshot. You might take a look-see before Willie shows you
to the scene.”
Manny handed Willie
the folder. “All the same to you, I’ll wait until I view the scene.
Maybe make some observations of my own. If that’s OK with
you.”
Lumpy shrugged. “Suit
yourself. Just a suggestion. And by the way, you need anything here
that Willie can’t get you, you come see me. With the chief laid up,
I’m the go-to man around here.”
“I’ll remember
that.”
“And here.” Lumpy
pulled a key ring from his pocket and tossed it onto the desk.
“This is for the apartment the tribe’s letting you use while you’re
here. Willie will show you where it is in the
housing.”
“That’s thoughtful of
you.”
“It’s the least I can
do. I picked the apartment myself.” Lumpy grinned. “You might find
it quite enjoyable while you’re here.”
Manny thanked him and
turned to Willie. “I’d like to view the scene while it’s still
light out.”
“Sure thing, Agent
Tanno. Your ride or mine?”
Lumpy tilted his head
back and laughed. “If you’re smart, you’ll do the driving. Agent
Tanno here was never the best driver in the world.”
He’d tell William
about his accidents some other time. “Your car will do fine. And
it’s ‘Manny.’”
Willie grinned. “Sure
thing, Manny.” As they walked through the front office, everyone
stopped typing and watched him leave the station. Indeed, by now
the masses were all aware that the “Living Legend” of Pine Ridge
had come back home. At least for one last case.