Shadow Prey

by John Sandford

  “You walk.”

  Stone thought about it for a few seconds, then nodded, stood up and fished in his shirt pocket. He pulled out a glass tube stoppered with black plastic. There were five chunks of crack stacked inside.

  “How much you need?” he asked.

  “All of it,” Lucas said. He took the tube away from Stone. “And stay the fuck away from that halfway house. If I catch you here again, I’ll bust your ass.”

  The medical examiner’s assistants were hauling Benton’s body out of the Indian Center when Lucas got back. A TV cameraman walked backward in front of the gurney as it rolled down the sidewalk carrying the sheet-shrouded body, then did a neat two-step-and-swivel to pan across the faces of a small crowd of onlookers. Lucas walked around the crowd and down the line of squad cars. Yellow Hand was waiting impatiently. Lucas got the patrolman to open the back door and climbed in beside the kid.

  “Why don’t you hike over to that 7-Eleven and get yourself a doughnut,” Lucas suggested to the cop.

  “Nah. Too many calories,” the cop said. He settled back in the front seat.

  “Look, take a fuckin’ hike, will you?” Lucas asked in exasperation.

  “Oh. Sure. Yeah. I’ll go get a doughnut,” the uniform said, finally picking up the hint. There were rumors about Davenport . . . .

  Lucas watched the cop walk away and then turned to Yellow Hand.

  “Who was this guy?”

  “Aw, Davenport, I don’t know this guy . . . .” Yellow Hand’s Adam’s apple bobbed earnestly.

  Lucas took the glass tube out of his pocket, turned it in his fingers so the kid could see the dirty-white chunks of crack. Yellow Hand’s tongue flicked across his lips as Lucas slowly worked the plastic stopper out of the tube and tipped the five rocks into his palm.

  “This is good shit,” Lucas said casually. “I took it off Elwood Stone up at the halfway house. You know Elwood? His mama cooks it up. They get it from the Cubans over on the West Side of St. Paul. Really good shit.”

  “Man. Oh, man. Don’t do this.”

  Lucas held one of the small rocks between a thumb and index finger. “Who was it?”

  “Man, I can’t . . .” Yellow Hand was in agony, twisting his thin hands. Lucas crushed the rock, pushed the door open with his elbow, and let it trickle to the ground like sand running through an hourglass.

  “Please, don’t do that.” Yellow Hand was appalled.

  “Four more,” Lucas said. “All I need is a name and you can take off.”

  “Oh, man . . .”

  Lucas picked up another rock and held it close to Yellow Hand’s face and just started to squeeze when Yellow Hand blurted, “Wait.”

  “Who?”

  Yellow Hand looked out the window. It was warm now, but you could feel the chill in the night air. Winter was coming. A bad time to be an Indian on the streets.

  “Bluebird,” he muttered. They came from the same reservation and he’d sold the man for four pieces of crack.

  “Who?”

  “Tony Bluebird. He’s got a house off Franklin.”

  “What house?”

  “Shit, I don’t know the number . . . .” he whined. His eyes shifted. A traitor’s eyes.

  Lucas held the rock to Yellow Hand’s face again. “Going, going . . .”

  “You know that house where the old guy painted the porch pillars with polka dots?” Yellow Hand spoke in haste now, eager to get it over.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s two up from that. Up towards the TV store.”

  “Has this guy ever been in trouble? Bluebird?”

  “Oh, yeah. He did a year in Stillwater. Burglary.”

  “What else?”

  Yellow Hand shrugged. “He’s from Fort Thompson. He goes there in the summer and works here in the winter. I don’t know him real good, he was just back on the res, you know? Got a woman, I think. I don’t know, man. He mostly knows my family. He’s older than I am.”

  “Has he got a gun?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not like he’s a friend. I never heard of him getting in fights or nothing.”

  “All right,” Lucas said. “Where are you staying?”

  “In the Point. The top floor, with some other guys.”

  “Wasn’t that one of Ray Cuervo’s places? Before he got cut?”

  “Yeah.” Yellow Hand was staring at the crack on Lucas’ palm.

  “Okay.” Lucas tipped the four remaining rocks back into the test tube and handed it to Yellow Hand. “Stick this in your sock and get your ass back to the Point. If I come looking, you better be there.”

  “I will,” Yellow Hand said eagerly.

  Lucas nodded. The back door of the squad had no handles and he had carefully avoided closing it. Now he pushed it open and stepped out, and Yellow Hand slid across and got out beside him. “This better be right. This Bluebird,” Lucas said, jabbing a finger into Yellow Hand’s thin chest.

  Yellow Hand nodded. “It was him. I talked to him.”

  “Okay. Beat it.”

  Yellow Hand hurried away. Lucas watched him for a moment, then walked across the street to the Indian Center. He found Wentz in the director’s office.

  “So how’s our witness?” the cop asked.

  “On his way home.”

  “Say what?”

  “He’ll be around,” Lucas said. “He says the guy we want is named Tony Bluebird. Lives down on Franklin. I know the house, and he’s got a sheet. We should be able to get a photo.”

  “God damn,” Wentz said. He reached for a telephone. “Let me get that downtown.”

  Lucas had nothing more to do. Homicide was for Homicide cops. Lucas was Intelligence. He ran networks of street people, waitresses, bartenders, barbers, gamblers, hookers, pimps, bookies, dealers in cars and cocaine, mail carriers, a couple of burglars. The crooks were small-timers, but they had eyes and memories. Lucas was always ready with a dollar or a threat, whatever was needed to make a snitch feel wanted.

  He had nothing to do with it, but after Yellow Hand produced the name, Lucas hung around to watch the cop machine work. Sometimes it was purely a pleasure. Like now: when the Homicide cop called downtown, several things happened at once.

  A check with the identification division confirmed Yellow Hand’s basic information and got a photograph of Tony Bluebird started out to the Indian Center.

  At the same time, the Minneapolis Emergency Response Unit began staging in a liquor store parking lot a mile from Bluebird’s suspected residence.

  While the ERU got together, a further check with utility companies suggested that Bluebird lived in the house where Yellow Hand had put him. Forty minutes after Yellow Hand spoke Bluebird’s name, a tall black man in an army fatigue jacket and blue jeans ambled down the street past Bluebird’s to the house next door, went up on the porch, knocked, flashed his badge and asked himself inside. The residents didn’t know any Bluebird, but people came and went, didn’t they?

  Another detective, a white guy who looked as if he’d been whipped through hell with a soot bag, stopped at the house before Bluebird’s and went through the same routine.

  “Yeah, Tony Bluebird, that’s the guy’s name, all right,” said the elderly man who met him at the door. “What’s he done?”

  “We’re not sure he did anything,” said the detective. “Have you seen this guy lately? I mean, today?”

  “Hell, yes. Not a half an hour ago, he came up the walk and went inside.” The old man nervously gummed his lower lip. “Still in there, I guess.”

  The white detective called in and confirmed Bluebird’s presence. Then he and the black detective did a careful scan of Bluebird’s house from the windows of the adjoining homes and called their information back to the ERU leader. Normally, when they had a man pinned, they’d try to make contact, usually by phone. But Bluebird, they thought, might be some kind of maniac. Maybe a danger to hostages or himself. They decided to take him. The ERUs, riding in nondescript vans, moved up to a second
stage three blocks from Bluebird’s.

  While all that was going on, Betty Sails picked Bluebird out of a photo spread. The basketball player confirmed the identification.

  “That’s a good snitch you got there, Lucas,” Wentz said approvingly. “You coming along?”

  “Might as well.”

  The ERU found a blind spot around the back door of Bluebird’s house. The door had no window, and the only other window near it had the shade pulled. They could move up to the door, take it out and be inside before Bluebird had even a hint of their presence.

  And it would have worked if Bluebird’s landlord hadn’t been so greedy. The landlord had illegally subdivided the house into a duplex. The division had been practical, rather than aesthetic: the doorway connecting the front of the house to the back had been covered with a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood.

  When the tac commander said “Go,” one of the ERUs tossed a flash-bang grenade through Bluebird’s side window. The terrific explosion and brilliant flash would freeze anyone inside for several seconds, long enough for the ERU team to get on top of him. When the flash-bang went off, another ERU blew the back door open with an AVON round fired from his shotgun, and the team leader went through the door, followed by three of his men.

  A young Mexican woman was lying half asleep on the sofa, a baby on her stomach. An older kid, a toddler, was sitting in a dilapidated playpen. The Mexican woman had been nursing the baby and her shirt was open, her breasts exposed. She struggled to sit up, reacting to the flash-bang and the AVONs, her mouth and eyes wide with fear.

  The team leader blocked a hallway, and the biggest man on the squad hit the plywood barrier, kicked it twice and gave up.

  “We’re blocked out, we’re blocked out,” he shouted.

  “Is there any way to the front?” the team leader yelled at the Mexican woman. The woman, still dazed, didn’t understand, and the team leader took his men out and rotated them down the side of the house.

  They were ten seconds into the attack, still hoping to do it clean, when a woman screamed from the front of the house. Then there were a couple of shots, a window shattered, and the leader figured Bluebird had a hostage. He called the team off.

  Sex was strange, the team leader thought.

  He stood with his back against the crumbling white siding of the house, the shotgun still in his hand, sweat pouring down his face. The attack had been chaotic, the response—the shooting—had been the kind of thing he feared, a close-up firefight with a nut, where you might have a pistol right up your nose. With all that, the image of the Mexican woman’s thin breast stayed in his mind’s eye and in his throat, and he could barely concentrate on the life-and-death confrontation he was supposed to be directing . . . .

  When Lucas arrived, two marked squads were posted in front of Bluebird’s house, across the street, and ERUs waited on the porches of the houses on either side of Bluebird’s. A blocking team was out back. Drum music leaked from the house.

  “Are we talking to him?” Lucas asked the tac commander.

  “We called him on the phone, but we lost the phone,” the tac commander said. “Phone company says it’s out of order. We think he pulled the line.”

  “How many people are in there?”

  The tac commander shrugged. “The neighbors say he’s got a wife and a couple of kids, preschool kids. Don’t know about anybody else.”

  A television truck rolled up to the end of the street, where a patrolman stopped it. A StarTribune reporter appeared at the other end of the block, a photographer humping along behind. One of the TV crew stopped arguing with the patrolman long enough to point at Lucas and yell. When Lucas turned, she waved, and Lucas ambled down the block. Neighbors were being herded along the sidewalk. There’d been a birthday party going on at one house and a half-dozen kids floated helium balloons over the gathering crowd. It looked like a carnival, Lucas thought.

  “What’s happening, Davenport?” the TV reporter yelled past the patrolman. The reporter was a Swede of the athletic variety, with high cheekbones, narrow hips and blood-red lipstick. A cameraman stood next to her, his camera focused on the Bluebird house.

  “That killing down at the Indian Center today? We think we got the guy trapped inside.”

  “He got hostages?” the reporter asked. She didn’t have a notebook.

  “We don’t know.”

  “Can we get any closer? Any way? We need a better angle . . . .”

  Lucas glanced around the blocked-off area.

  “How about if we try to get you in that alley over there, between those houses? You’ll be further away, but you’ll have a direct shot at the front . . . .”

  “Something’s going down,” the cameraman said. He was looking at the Bluebird house through his camera’s telephoto setting.

  “Ah, shit,” said the reporter. She tried to ease past the patrolman to stand next to Lucas, but the patrolman blocked her with a hip.

  “Catch you later,” Lucas said over his shoulder as he turned and started back.

  “C’mon, Davenport . . .”

  Lucas shook his head and kept going. The ERU team leader on the porch of the left-hand house was yelling at Bluebird’s. He got a response, stepped back a bit and took out a handset.

  “What?” asked Lucas, when he got back to the command unit.

  “He said he’s sending his people out,” said a cop on a radio.

  “I’m backing everybody off,” said the tac commander. As Lucas leaned on the roof to watch, the tac commander sent a patrolman scrambling along the row of cars, to warn the ERUs and the uniformed officers that people were coming out of the house. A moment later, a white towel waved at the door and a woman stepped out, holding a baby. She was dragging another kid, maybe three years old, by one arm.

  “Come on, come on, you’re okay,” the detective called out. She looked back once, then walked quickly, head down, on the sidewalk through the line of cars.

  Lucas and the tac commander moved over to intercept her.

  “Who are you?” the tac commander asked.

  “Lila Bluebird.”

  “Is that your husband in there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has he got anybody with him?”

  “He’s all alone,” the woman said. Tears streamed down her face. She was wearing a man’s cowboy shirt and shorts made of stretchy black material spotted with lint fuzzies. The baby clung to her shirt, as though he knew what was going on; the other kid hung on her hand. “He said to tell you he’ll be out in a minute.”

  “He drunk? Crack? Crank? Anything like that?”

  “No. No alcohol or drugs in our house. But he’s not right.”

  “What’s that? You mean he’s crazy? What . . .”

  The question was never finished. The door of the Bluebird house burst open and Tony Bluebird hurdled onto the lawn, running hard. He was bare-chested, the long obsidian blade dangling from his neck on a rawhide thong. Two eagle feathers were pinned to his headdress and he had pistols in both hands. Ten feet off the porch, he brought them up and opened fire on the nearest squad, closing on the cops behind it. The cops shot him to pieces. The gunfire stood him up and knocked him down.

  After a second of stunned silence, Lila Bluebird began to wail and the older kid, confused, clutched at her leg and began screaming. The radio man called for paramedics. Three cops moved up to Bluebird, their pistols still pointed at his body, and nudged his weapons out of reach.

  The tac commander looked at Lucas, his mouth working for a moment before the words came out. “Jesus Christ,” he blurted. “What the fuck was that all about?”

  CHAPTER

  3

  Wild grapes covered the willow trees, dangling forty and fifty feet down to the waterline. In the weak light from the Mendota Bridge, the island looked like a three-masted schooner with black sails, cruising through the mouth of the Minnesota River into the Mississippi.

  Two men walked onto a sand spit at the tip of the island. They�
�d had a fire earlier in the evening, roasting wieners on sharp sticks and heating cans of SpaghettiOs. The fire had guttered down to coals, but the smell of the burning pine still hung in the cool air. A hundred feet back from the water’s edge, a sweat lodge squatted under the willows.

  “We ought to go up north. It’d be nice now, out on the lakes,” said the taller one.

  “It’s been too warm. Too many mosquitoes.”

  The tall man laughed. ‘Bullshit, mosquitoes. We’re Indians, dickhead.”

  “Them fuckin’ Chippewa would take our hair,” the short one objected, the humor floating through his voice.

  “Not us. Kill their men, screw their women. Drink their beer.”

  “I ain’t drinkin’ no Grain Belt,” said the short one. There was a moment’s comfortable silence between them. The short one took a breath, let it out in an audible sigh and said, “Too much to do. Can’t fuck around up north.”

  The short man’s face had sobered. The tall man couldn’t see it, but sensed it. “I wish I could go pray over Bluebird,” the tall man said. After a moment, he added, “I hoped he would go longer.”

  “He wasn’t smart.”

  “He was spiritual.”

  “Yep.”

  The men were Mdewakanton Sioux, cousins, born the same day on the banks of the Minnesota River. One had been named Aaron Sunders and the other Samuel Close, but only the bureaucrats called them that. To everyone else they touched, they were the Crows, named for their mothers’ father, Dick Crow.

  Later in life, a medicine man gave them Dakota first names. The names were impossible to translate. Some Dakota argued for Light Crow and Dark Crow. Others said Sun Crow and Moon Crow. Still others claimed the only reasonable translation was Spiritual Crow and Practical Crow. But the cousins called themselves Aaron and Sam. If some Dakota and white-wannabees thought the names were not impressive enough, that was their lookout.

  The tall Crow was Aaron, the spiritual man. The short Crow was Sam, the practical one. In the back of their pickup, Aaron carried an army footlocker full of herbs and barks. In the cab, Sam carried two .45s, a Louisville Slugger and a money belt. They considered themselves one person in two bodies, each body containing a single aspect. It had been that way since 1932, when the daughters of Dick Crow and their two small sons had huddled together in a canvas lean-to for four months, near starving, near freezing, fighting to stay alive. From December through March, the cousins had lived in a cardboard box full of ripped-up woolen army blankets. The four months had welded their two personalities into one. They had been inseparable for nearly sixty years, except for a time that Aaron had spent in federal prison.