When he took over as DA, he’d asked Clay Fulton to head up the team of NYPD detectives assigned to the district attorney’s office. He and Fulton had known each other for nearly three decades when the former was a wet-behind-the-ears assistant district attorney and the latter a snot-nosed detective in the New York Police Department. The job with the DA’s office was a step down for Fulton, who’d worked his way up to inspector for the department, one of the bosses. But Karp knew that his friend had tired of the bureaucratic mess and mounds of paperwork at the top and was itching to be a cop again…like now. Shootings weren’t exactly big news on the island of Manhattan. He knew Fulton wouldn’t have mentioned it if there wasn’t something unusual about this one.
“Multiple homicide, four victims in a limo,” the detective went on.
Uh-oh, Karp thought. Here it comes.
“One of the victims has been tentatively identified as a pretty big-time rap artist who goes by—or I should say, went by—ML Rex, also known as Martin Johnson. Also, the chauffeur of the limo is missing.”
Shit, Karp swore to himself. A celebrity, which means a lot of media coverage and pressure to come to a quick resolution. “Any suspects?” he asked.
“No one yet,” Fulton responded. “But the detectives at the scene seem to think it may be gang-related; apparently these rap punks are always shooting each other.”
In spite of himself, Karp sighed. Missing priests and missing chauffeurs, a wife and daughter in the middle of a desert, and a gang-related murder of a celebrity. It was going to be a long, hot summer. Stupenagel would be pleased.
At that moment, he looked up and found himself staring into the eyes of Andrew Kane across the expanse of the ballroom. He knew then that he’d made an enemy for life, but he didn’t let it bother him. If he wants a piece of Butch Karp, he thought, he’s going to have to take a number and wait his turn.
9
SOME FIFTEEN HUNDRED MILES WEST AND SOUTH OF New York City, and in some ways a thousand years removed, John Jojola willed his tired feet to shuffle to the tempo of a dozen hide-covered drums. Sweat dripped into his eyes beneath the elaborate kachina mask of painted wood, leather, and feathers that he wore to represent one of the ancestral spirits of his people. The pounding of the drums reverberated off the rectangular, salmon-colored adobe homes of the Taos Pueblo and throughout his body. As he danced, he prayed to the spirits of his people while the drummers sang to these spirits, asking for their help, the repetitive chanting broken occasionally by a ululating cry.
The drummers and dancers had been at it since dawn. Now, sweat glistened on the bare parts of their bodies in the afternoon sun and ran in rivulets through the layer of dust that covered them from head to foot. Jojola and the other exhausted men moved trancelike as they willed the beating of their hearts to become one with that of the drums and carry their tired bodies on into the night.
At various times of the year, the Taos people danced and let tourists—who brought their money to the reservation to purchase arts and crafts, as well as to gamble at the reservation’s casino—watch, although no photographs were allowed. The visitors were particularly appreciative of the graceful women dancers in their tall, white deerskin moccasins at traditional festivals such as the Green Corn Dance. But most of the tribe’s rituals and ceremonies were conducted in secrecy.
Every winter, from the first bitter days of December through the warming of early spring, the entire reservation was closed to all but tribal members, who used the time to reconnect as a people and carry on traditions that sustained their culture. In the privacy of the sequestered village, the men performed the masked kachina dances to promote harmony and order in the universe. If the rituals were done properly, the ancestral spirits would ensure abundant game, enough water for the crops, and the health of the people.
Occasionally, unforeseen circumstances or catastrophes would push the world out of harmony, and the tribal council would close the pueblo so that the kachinas might be implored to intercede on behalf of the people. Now was such a time.
A great evil seemed to be stalking the people—three young boys had disappeared in as many months—and the authorities seemed unable to stop it. So, after much debate in one of the kivas—a large, covered, circular pit in the ground where the men gathered for ceremonies and important discussions—the tribal council decided to conduct a dance to cleanse the reservation and ask for help from the spirit world. Officers from the tiny Taos Pueblo Police Department, wearing the traditional black skirt over their uniform trousers, were stationed on the roads leading to the pueblo to politely, but firmly, turn away anyone who was not a member of the tribe. Then the tribe gathered at the ancient pueblo, the heart of their culture.
Jojola was short and thick, but not fat save for a little extra padding around his waist that he figured was his right at fifty-three years old. He wore his hair long and loose in the traditional way, with the ends reaching the middle of his back, and still black except for interwoven tendrils of gray that ran its length like veins of silver in a coal mine.
Beneath the kachina mask, his face was much like the land around the village—darkened by the sun, lined with ravines, but otherwise wide and flat except for the generous nose that protruded like Taos Mountain, the volcanic peak that dominated the landscape immediately east of the pueblo. Widely spaced above high cheekbones, his eyes were usually coffee brown and reflected his gentle nature and lively sense of humor; but when angered, they turned dark and hard like flint.
Jojola had been dancing since the ceremony began without water or food and was entering the phase when exhaustion, deprivation, and the mind-numbing thudding of the drums produced hallucinations. In fact, he was sure that the kachina dancer next to him was one such hallucination because the spirit man danced like his childhood friend, Charlie Many Horses.
When their eyes met through the masks, he was sure of it. But that could not be. Charlie had been killed in a Vietcong ambush back in 1968 when they were both soldiers in the U. S. Army. He wondered if any of the other dancers were ghosts, perhaps the restless shades of men he had killed in those years.
Jojola had lived on the reservation all of his life—never venturing farther than the city of Santa Fe, seventy miles to the south, and that only twice—until he and Charlie were drafted into the army in 1966. On the way to Vietnam after bootcamp, the young men had a brief layover in Los Angeles and went out to see the sights. They found the city to be intimidating—dirty and indifferent—and wondered how people could live there without losing their spirit. While their people had lived in multistoried complexes long before the first European showed up, they spent much of their lives outside in the high mesa desert to the west or up in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains that hemmed in the reservation on the north and east.
Jojola and Many Horses were much more comfortable after they arrived in Vietnam and were sent to a firebase in the central highlands. Even though the grasslands and forests were more lush than the arid country they came from, they quickly adapted.
Both had grown up together tracking wild game, learning patience and stealth from their elders so that they could move to within a few feet of their prey. The army recognized that the young men moved through the landscape of Southeast Asia as easily as shadows, making no sound as they approached or leaving any trace of their route when they left. They were soon given a special assignment: stalking Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army soldiers as they traveled along the paths.
As a LURP team—for Long Range Reconnaisance Patrol—they would disappear into the bush, sometimes transported by helicopters, for weeks at a time, living off the land, setting up ambushes, then fading back into the landscape. The enemy soon learned to fear the “ghosts” who could slip into a village or compound at night, kill silently, and be gone before anyone raised an alarm.
The men did not enjoy killing. But they’d been placed in a situation where they had no choice and did as they were told out of a sense of duty. But halfway through their first t
our of duty, their attitudes were changed by an act of evil.
In their forays, Jojola and Many Horses had been befriended by the inhabitants of a Hmong village. The Hmong were simple farmers who would have preferred to carry on as they had for centuries. However, the North Vietnamese, and their Vietcong allies, considered the independent-minded Hmong antithetical to their socialist aspirations and at best treated them with contempt and at worst, brutally. So the Hmong were sympathetic to the American forces, though this particular village stayed out of the fighting. But one day, the two Indians arrived at the village to discover that the people had been massacred, and worse, their ears had been sliced off because, according to a few survivors, they’d listened to “imperialist propaganda.”
From that moment on, Jojola and Many Horses had repaid the enemy in kind. The ghosts who crept into the lairs of their enemy—even into the tunnel systems beneath the jungle floor, hunting the VC like ferrets after prairie dogs—were no longer satisfied with just killing. They removed the ears of their victims, stringing them together on pieces of twine, then returning to the firebase where they flung their trophies onto the barbed wire of the perimeter as a warning and a threat.
Many died and were so mutilated, but there was one man they could not catch. The survivors from the slaughtered village had not been able to identify the leader giving orders that day. Jojola and Many Horses believed it had to have been one particular Vietcong, a former schoolteacher who had proved to be their most formidable foe. They did not know his real name but he was referred to by his comrades and enemies alike as Cop, which meant tiger. Wholesale slaughters and mutilation had not previously been part of his tactics, but they assumed it was him because he controlled most VC activity in the area. He was also known to be a hard man who dealt harshly with “traitors” who fraternized with Americans.
For the next year and a half that took them well into their second tour, Cop escaped every trap they set for him, showing an uncanny ability to stay one step ahead. They would get a report that he was camped in a certain area, but when they arrived he and his men would be gone.
Occasionally, they would catch the rear guard he left behind to ensnare his would-be assassins and more ears were added to the collection, but the ears they wanted most remained on the head of their owner. Then one day when Jojola was in Saigon for a little R & R, Charlie received a report that Cop was in a nearby village. He’d left on his own to catch the man who’d killed their friends, but instead, he’d fallen into a trap and died.
When Jojola later found his friend’s body, Charlie’s earless head had been cut from his body and set on a stake. Seeing that, Jojola removed the big bone-handled knife he’d carried from Taos and slashed the muscles of his chest in self-mortification and swore a blood oath that somehow, someday he would meet and kill Cop.
With so little time left on Jojola’s tour, and worried about his mental health, the army had allowed him to accompany the remains of his friend back to the Taos Pueblo. After the services, he returned to the army only long enough to be formally discharged; he then went home to his people.
When he first returned, he’d been hailed by the local press as an American hero. But he was a troubled young man, haunted by the ghosts of men he’d killed and the one he couldn’t save.
At first he’d gone into the mountains and lived as a recluse, hunting and fishing, hoping that the ghosts would tire of such a lonely existence and leave him alone. But he’d missed his people and returned to the pueblo, only to meet an enemy he could not defeat, alcohol, turning to booze to muffle the voices of the dead and hide their faces.
For the next fifteen years, he’d worked as a manual laborer—at least when he wasn’t sleeping off a drinking binge. During a brief period of sobriety, he met and married a young Taos Indian woman, Maria Little Deer. Marriage outside the tribe was prohibited—the spouses of the few who ignored the rule were not allowed to live on the reservation—which limited the number of available women. So he felt himself fortunate to find someone so beautiful and innocent, untainted by the world outside the pueblo, and he thought at first she might save him. But he’d eventually returned to the bottle and dragged her down with him. Together they’d made quite a spectacle, begging from tourists and the affluent influx of new residents flocking to what was becoming a trendy art community. They slept as often in the county jail as they had their run-down double-wide trailer on the reservation.
Then a miracle happened. Maria got pregnant and gave birth to a son in their home, attended by one of the tribe’s midwives. He held the child and was ashamed that his once-strong hands shook like aspen leaves in a breeze and that his eyes had trouble focusing on the infant’s face. He didn’t hold the baby for long though; there was something wrong—his son was not breathing properly. The midwife took the child and rushed him to the intensive care unit of the Taos medical center. When Jojola arrived in another car, a nurse informed him that the doctors were worried that his son was suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome and needed extra oxygen to prevent brain damage.
Standing outside the nursery, looking at his son struggling to breathe in an incubator, Jojola broke down and cried. He prayed to the kachinas to intercede with the Creator on behalf of his child so that the boy would not suffer for the parents’ sins. He promised that if they helped his son, he would never drink again. The spirits answered, and a few days later, the doctor released the infant to the Jojolas’ care saying the child, whom they named Charlie after his friend, appeared to have somehow escaped the ill effects of their boozing.
That was thirteen years earlier, and Jojola hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol since and slowly turned his life around. When he had been sober for six months and thought he could handle it, he began attending Taos Community College and eventually got his associate’s degree in criminal justice and joined the Taos Pueblo Police Department.
Maria, however, did not follow. It had been easy to pull her down into the depths of alcoholism, but he found it impossible to bring her back up. She tried immediately after their son was born and at various times in between, but the disease controlled her spirit. Then one day he came home early from work and found her in bed with another man. He left so that he would not be tempted to kill either. When he returned, she was gone, taking everything she might be able to sell, but leaving him little Charlie.
Jojola had grieved—for her, and what he’d contributed to with the booze, for himself and lost love, and for his son, who had no mother. Taking his son, he’d retreated into the arms of his culture, moving out of the trailer and into the ancient pueblo.
• • •
As he taught his son, when the Spanish arrived in the area in the late 1500s, they discovered nineteen pueblos—their word for towns—dotted along the Rio Grande River Valley running south to north. The interlopers hoped that they’d found the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, which were said to be made of gold. But instead they discovered multistoried block houses. They were made of adobe—a combination of mud and stone formed into bricks and laid in walls several feet thick, then plastered with thick layers of mud to smooth the surfaces inside and out. The roofs were supported by logs, called vigas by the Spanish, brought down from the mountains, which were covered with smaller poles, called latillas, laid crosswise on the vigas. Dirt was then packed into the roof structure and then that was covered by mud as well.
Some of the rectangular homes had been built on top of others as high as four stories and reached by the use of rough wooden ladders. The bottom structures lacked windows and doors and were accessible only through holes in the roofs, constructed that way as a defense against raiding parties of Comanche and Arapaho. The Spanish discovered that the thick walls also kept the interiors cool in the summer and warm when the winter winds howled down from the north.
While not so grand and rich as the conquered cities of the Aztec and Inca far to the south, the pueblo Indians had farmed and hunted from these established, well-ordered urban communities for five hund
red, perhaps more, years. Five hundred more years later, the Taos Pueblo, the northernmost of the New Mexico sites, was the oldest continuously inhabited community in North America.
“And it still looks much the same as it did when the Spanish first came,” Jojola told Charlie. “Except now our homes on the lower level have windows and doors.” He laughed. “The Comanche and Arapaho finally got tired of raiding us.”
• • •
By tribal law, no electricity or plumbing was allowed in the village. Water came from a clear stream that ran through the village from sacred Blue Lake high on the southern slope of Taos Mountain. Bread was baked outdoors in igloo-shaped adobe ovens, and the homes were heated by wood fires.
Most of the nineteen thousand members of the tribe no longer lived in the pueblo all year round. They stayed during the warm months in modest houses and trailers with modern conveniences on reservation land. However, the families kept their traditional homes in the village, where they lived during festivals, in winter, and in troubled times when the tribe’s members pulled in tight to each other like a herd of buffalo does when threatened by wolves.
A couple of hundred people did live in the pueblo all year round, including John and Charlie, when they moved into their family’s traditional home. For the nine years that followed, Jojola had done his best to raise his son in the traditions of their people. He taught him to fish and hunt, and thank the animals for the sacrifice that gave the people food to supplement the corn and beans they raised.
Charlie was taught to live in harmony with the physical and spiritual world. And that in pueblo society there were two types of clans—warrior clans, responsible for issues outside the tribe, and spiritual clans that dealt with internal issues. “We belong to a spiritual clan,” Jojola said, “the Gray Coyote, although that does not mean we are not also warriors.”
On spiritual guidance for his son, however, Jojola did not just look to the old ways. Ninety percent of the Taos Pueblo inhabitants were Catholic, including him and his son, but it was a version of the Church of Rome intermixed with the beliefs of their own culture. He did not believe that there was only one way for a man to be closer to the Creator and be in harmony with the world. And in his most important decisions, he turned more often to the spirits of his people, including how he’d eventually learned to live with the ghosts that haunted him.
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