The Red Power Murders

by Thomas King

  What Thumps did know was that Hockney was a good cop. A good cop who didn’t know the difference between hot coffee and hot tar.

  “I wouldn’t drink that if I were you.”

  “You’re not me,” said Hockney. “What about it?”

  “What about what?”

  “The next few days.” Hockney wrapped his hands around the cup.

  Thumps wondered if hot tar held heat longer than hot water. “I’m busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Taking pictures.”

  “Of Noah Ridge?”

  Thumps felt as though he was about to step into a hole. “Archie hired me to capture the moment.”

  “Perfect,” said Hockney. “You get paid twice for doing one job.”

  Thumps sighed. He could see where this was going. And he didn’t like it.

  “I need a deputy.”

  Hockney had two full-time deputies, Lance Packard and Andy Hooper. Lance was young and green, a good-natured kid who gave out speeding tickets with a reluctance that made people feel sorry for him.

  “What about Lance?”

  “He’s at a conference in Denver.”

  Andy Hooper was a harder piece of work, a man who understood law enforcement as a personal punishment visited on the wicked and the undeserving. Andy had an Old Testament mentality that allowed him to divide the world into good and evil, black and white, rich and poor. Lance liked to believe the best about people. Andy went looking for the worst.

  “Andy?”

  “He’s busy.”

  So, Andy was back in Hockney’s doghouse. “So am I.”

  Hockney snorted and swirled the coffee around in the cup.

  Thumps tried the offensive. “Weren’t you going to fire Andy?”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “What about one of the guys over in Missoula?”

  Hockney leaned back in the chair. “You were in Salt Lake same time as Ridge, weren’t you?”

  “You asking me to play bodyguard?”

  “Nope,” said Hockney. “He’s got himself his very own FBI agent. Nice young man. Stopped by this morning and introduced himself. All official-like.”

  Ridge had drawn that kind of attention in Salt Lake too. FBI. State police. City police. Even the security services of the Mormon Church. The joke that went around was that there were more people watching Ridge than there were members in RPM.

  “Evidently, he’s written a book.” Hockney wrinkled his nose. “One of those tell-all exposés.”

  “You read it?”

  “Parts,” said the sheriff. “Has an interesting chapter on that woman. The one who disappeared.”

  Lucy Kettle. Thumps had met her at the University of Utah. She was there on a scholarship, working at the American West Center. Cheyenne, if he remembered right. Lucy was smart, good-looking, serious, and opinionated. Not a combination that sat easy with everyone.

  Men, for instance.

  Noah Ridge, on the other hand, was a beer commercial. All action and motion. Feathers and leathers. Headbands and dark glasses. Thumps was never sure how much of the warrior-macho was for the cause and how much was for the cameras. Thumps suspected Ridge didn’t know either.

  Lucy had a hard analytic side that liked to understand the problem before she went to war. Ridge didn’t need a reason. The two of them had little in common, but by the time the Red Power Movement opened its storefront on Main Street, Lucy had quit her job at the American West Center and moved in as the organization’s communications director.

  Then one fall evening, she headed home and was never seen again.

  “How about it?” said Hockney. “What do you think happened?”

  No one worried when Lucy didn’t show up the next day. But after a week, when she didn’t return to work or to her house, the police rolled into RPM headquarters and arrested Noah with little more than a fervent hope that they could hang a murder charge on him. And to further their cause, they slipped rumours disguised as fact to an eager press that fought over every tidbit like magpies on road kill. One story cast Lucy and Noah as lovers in a romance gone bad. Another saw them as opponents in an RPM power struggle. There was even talk that Ridge had discovered that Lucy was a mole working for the FBI.

  They were all nice theories, but when the dust cleared, Ridge was still standing and the police were left holding air.

  “There was a postcard waiting for Mr. Ridge at the hotel,” said Hockney.

  Thumps waited to see if the sheriff was going to tell him about the postcard or if he was going to make him ask.

  “‘Happy trails, kemo-sabe.’” Hockney leaned back in the chair. “‘Today is a good day to die.’”

  Thumps felt his body tense.

  “The Gene Autry/Lone Ranger bit is cute, don’t you think?”

  “Roy Rogers/Lone Ranger.”

  “Whatever.” Duke leaned forward. “But the best part was the card itself.”

  “Salt Lake City?”

  “Damn, DreadfulWater,” said Hockney, unable to keep the smile off his face, “you still have all the moves. So, exactly what happened down south?”

  “Don’t remember.”

  “Sure you do,” said the sheriff, who was enjoying this more than Thumps would have expected.

  “Police and the FBI turned that case inside out and upside down. Came up empty.”

  “That’s the way I hear it too.” Hockney wrote something on a piece of paper and slid it across the desk.

  Thumps looked at the figure. “For one day?”

  The sheriff snorted. “Two days. Maybe three.”

  “Playing deputy pays pretty well.”

  “Better than playing photographer,” said Hockney.

  “You think this is serious?”

  “Don’t know. And don’t much care.” Hockney looked at the bottom of his coffee cup. “But if someone is going to kill Mr. Ridge, they’re sure as hell not going to do it in my town.”

  THE WIND WAS stronger now. And colder. As Thumps walked to the Sally Ann, he realized he hadn’t said no to Hockney. He pulled his neck down into his jacket. Maybe it was time to take that trip he had been promising himself. A trip to someplace exotic. Someplace photographic. Someplace south. Where he could go for a working vacation and take it off his income tax. Like the big photographers. Adams, Sexton, Mann, Sturges, Leibovitz, Salgado, Mark, Bond. Not that he brought in enough income to write it off. Or even to show up on the tax radar.

  Someplace quiet. Someplace where he wouldn’t see Anna and Callie every time he closed his eyes. Maybe a trip to such a place would help put those ghosts to rest. If nothing else, a trip would buy him space and time.

  Hockney didn’t need a photographer, and he didn’t need another deputy. What he needed was a babysitter. Someone who would make sure that Ridge didn’t become an embarrassment. Hockney had correctly deduced that Thumps knew the man from his days in Salt Lake. What the sheriff couldn’t know was how well the two men knew each other. Or how they might feel about finding themselves together in the same room.

  FOUR

  Fred and Della Blueford took turns running the Salvation Army thrift store. As Thumps opened the door, he hoped that it was Fred’s day.

  “Well, hello, stranger.”

  Thumps liked Della well enough, and he probably would have liked her even more if she hadn’t been so enthusiastic and optimistic all the time. Not that she had all that much to be optimistic about. She had lost a breast to cancer three years ago, Fred had suffered through a series of minor heart attacks, and the twin girls they had adopted had both been diagnosed with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Thumps knew people who had collapsed from much less weight. But Della always seemed to have a smile and a good word, as though it were her job to cheer up the world.

  “Snow’s going to be here any time,” she said. “Bet you can’t wait.”

  “I need a coat,” said Thumps, trying to sound upbeat. “Something warm.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Della. �
�That windbreaker’s not going to do the job. That’s for sure.”

  “Maybe something with a hood.”

  Della shook her head. “I had just the thing.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “Sold it last week. You in a hurry? People don’t tend to be as giving when the weather turns.”

  Thumps looked out the window. A storm was forming in the mountains. He could see it edging over the peaks. “Like to get one soon.”

  “Don’t have anything just now, but who knows what’ll come in tomorrow.”

  Thumps stood by the door, gathering up the last bit of warmth before he headed home. “Everybody okay?”

  “Couldn’t be better,” said Della with a big smile. “Couldn’t be better.”

  THE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA coast had been damp and foggy, but the temperature rarely dropped below fifty degrees. As long as you could manage long stretches without ever seeing the sun—and Thumps could—you were fine. Chinook didn’t have a temperature it didn’t like. Summers could send the mercury well above one hundred, while winter could find it huddled at thirty below.

  Freeway was asleep on the kitchen table when Thumps opened the front door and filled the house with cold air.

  “Get off the table.”

  The cat fluffed her fur, pulled her feet under her body, and glared at him. The two weeks Thumps had been gone had not sat well with Freeway.

  “Don’t give me that. Rose came by every day.”

  Rose Twinings was his neighbour four doors down. She had two dogs and was not particularly fond of cats, but whenever Thumps had to be away, Rose would come by and feed and water Freeway and change her litter. She would even sit with the cat and tell her stories. Most of them were about the great deeds that dogs had done, and Thumps was not sure whether Freeway appreciated this.

  “Did she tell you about the dog of Flanders?”

  This was Rose’s favourite story. Every time Thumps went to Rose’s to ask her to babysit Freeway, he would have to listen to this story. He had no idea how many times the cat had had to suffer through it.

  “Hungry?”

  Freeway did not answer rhetorical questions. As a matter of fact, she didn’t do much of anything. Thumps admired that quality in the cat. Not a bad life if you looked at it from the correct perspective.

  Thumps got the canned cat food from the refrigerator and breathed through his mouth as he peeled back the plastic lid. Freeway slid off the table like warm syrup on hotcakes.

  “Don’t gobble.”

  Again, a waste of breath. Freeway always gobbled. And then she would stroll over to the rug and throw up. Not all the time. Not enough to be predictable. Just enough to be annoying.

  Thumps put the kettle on and sat down at the table. Maybe he should take the sheriff’s offer. The money would help pay for that fantasy photography trip. What could happen to Noah in a couple of days? Especially with the kind of protection he was amassing. An FBI agent. Sheriff Duke Hockney. And Thumps DreadfulWater, armed to the teeth with a Canham 4x5 field camera, a Pentax spot meter, and a Ries tripod.

  The kettle began to whistle. Thumps fished a tea bag out of the drawer and dropped it into the hot water. Then he went looking for the phone. Noah wouldn’t have come to Chinook for free. Half the man might be activist, but the other half was entrepreneur.

  Thumps dialed Claire’s direct number, hoping he could slip by Roxanne Heavy Runner, the band’s office secretary. Roxanne was nice if you liked abrupt and martial. Today it was just too cold to manage Roxanne’s manner or her advice. Sometimes Thumps was lucky.

  “Band office.”

  Sometimes he wasn’t.

  “Hi, Roxanne. It’s me, Thumps.”

  The noise on the phone sounded vaguely like planes with propellers strafing ammunition dumps.

  “You got that picture done yet?”

  Thumps had promised Roxanne a print of the Snake River with the Tetons in the background. He hadn’t said when, and Roxanne was not much for delayed gratification.

  “It’s almost done.”

  “You said that two months ago.”

  “Is Claire in?”

  “Business or romance?”

  “Business.”

  “’Cause she hasn’t got time for romance.”

  Thumps was sure Roxanne didn’t intend it, but whenever he heard her voice, his first reaction was to duck. “I need to ask her something.”

  The grinding sound on the phone was either a bad connection or a tank driving over bones.

  “She’s up at Buffalo Mountain.”

  There was no pretense to Roxanne, and she wasn’t much of a joker. What you saw was what was there. Thumps leaned against the side of the refrigerator and sighed. Loudly enough so Roxanne could hear.

  “You want me to tell her you called?”

  “Sure.”

  Thumps put the phone on the table and ran through the possibilities. Noah could have come to Chinook as part of a book tour. From time to time, writers did show up in town for a reading, poets for the most part, along with a trickle of self-help, diet, gardening, and regional-history sorts. There had been a Native guy come through with a novel that had the word water in the title. Thumps had gone to the reading and had barely been able to stay awake.

  But Thumps couldn’t imagine that any publishing company would deliberately send someone like Noah Ridge to a place like Chinook. And he couldn’t imagine Ridge coming. Not on his own. When Ridge was in Salt Lake and at the top of his game, he had done speaking engagements all over North America and Europe. His standard fee then was five thousand dollars, seven thousand if he could get it.

  Then again, maybe Thumps was just being hard on the man. Noah, like Dennis Banks and Russell Means, had brought national attention to the problems Native people faced. He had taken on government indifference and corporate colonialism. He had helped organize young people on reservations and in cities. For all that, he had also been an unrepentant egotist. At least when Thumps knew him. Maybe he had changed. Maybe he had mellowed.

  Maybe he had found God.

  Thumps knew all about “maybes.” It was the first thing cops learned. It was the last thing cops forgot.

  Thumps picked up the phone, dialed the sheriff’s number, and got the answering machine. Thumps had a list of things he disliked. It included answering machines, cellphones, and those little computers you carried around in your shirt pocket.

  The sheriff, on the other hand, was fond of those kinds of gadgets. Thumps tried Duke’s cellphone number.

  “Make it good.”

  “It’s me, Thumps.”

  “I know who it is.”

  “I was thinking . . .”

  “Good,” said the sheriff, cutting Thumps off. “Meet me at the Holiday—”

  Thumps was in the middle of thinking of a good way to tell the sheriff that he’d help out with Noah, without making it seem as though he wanted to, when he realized that the line was dead.

  FIVE

  The Holiday Inn sat just off the interstate. Thumps could remember when all roads in the West ran through towns rather than by them. And while he understood the efficiency of highways, he also felt that you lost a great deal of the romance of travel if all you did was barrel along at speeds that numbed the mind and blurred the landscape. Slowing through towns forced you to see something of where you were going. On the highway, the only sights of any interest were the large green signs that called out the mileage.

  Thumps took the back way. He had just made the turn onto the frontage road when he realized that the sheriff had not told him where they were to meet. Thumps’s guess was the coffee shop. He wondered about the rest of the world, wondered whether people in Greece or India or New Zealand met in coffee shops when they wanted to talk with friends or business associates or lovers, wondered if coffee shops were just a North American phenomenon.

  Beth Mooney’s Chrysler station wagon was backed up to the front door. Not a good sign. While Beth had a family practice, she also doub
led as the county coroner. So far as Thumps knew, Beth and the sheriff didn’t meet socially, and when you saw the two of them together, it usually meant a body.

  Thumps wasn’t sure if he was intrigued or annoyed at Hockney’s invitation to a crime scene, but as he eased his Volvo into the parking lot, he could feel the old tensions from his days on the Northern California coast. From his days of playing cop. It was an unpleasant feeling, akin to having the wind knocked out of him. But it was also invigorating, like coming down a steep hill on skis.

  Thumps didn’t hear the knocking right away. For one thing, it was faint, more a distant tapping. For another, he was too busy looking for a parking space.

  “You can’t park here.” The man standing by Thumps’s window was probably in his late thirties, with thin hair and a long face that made him look as if he were in pain.

  Thumps watched the man as he tapped his knuckles against the window of the car.

  “You can’t park here.”

  Thumps rolled his window down just enough to hear what the man was trying to say, but not enough to let the warm air escape en masse.

  “What?”

  “You can’t park here.” The man hooked his fingers over the top of the window the way salesmen in movies wedged their feet into doorways.

  “I’m supposed to meet the sheriff.”

  The man let go of the window, stepped back, and looked at Thumps’s car. “You undercover?”

  “I’m a photographer.”

  “Okay,” said the man.

  “What happened?”

  “Just don’t park in the handicapped zone.”

  Thumps found a spot, jogged into the lobby as quickly as he could, and headed straight for the fireplace, where a happy gas flame was calling to him from a stack of bright ceramic logs. Neither the sheriff nor Beth was in the lobby. Thumps had assumed that the action would be someplace else. He just hoped that getting there did not involve going back outside.