Death Where the Bad Rocks Live

by C. M. Wendelboe

  “Come back tomorrow and you will get lost,” Uncle Marion had told young Manny every time they ventured here to search for fossils, or pluck herbs for the upcoming winter, or harvest smelly skunkbrush sumac for making the baskets that Unc sold.

  But the Old Ones knew this place teemed with life. The Old Ones only had to walk dry creek beds and gullies to locate the rabbitbrush the elk and deer grazed on to feed their horses, or locate yellow-waving sunflowers to harvest their nutrient-rich seeds. The Old Ones recognized that golden currants grew only on north-facing hillsides and where to pick them, using the summer-blooming plants in making pemmican. Most people saw the Badlands as an unforgiving place. Most people dared take only day trips and counted themselves fortunate to have made it out at the end of the day.

  But to the Lakota, this was the Sheltering Place, the Stronghold, and it had sheltered and protected their ancestors well for hundreds of years. But this Sheltering Place demanded payment for those not strong enough—or savvy enough—to decipher her riddle of survival.

  Thirty feet above them on the side of the hill some ancient Lakota woman had dug a cooking pit. Unc would send Manny scrambling up such a hillside, where he would filter the dirt through his fingers, filter remnants of charcoal from such stone-lined fire pits. And sometimes Manny would be rewarded with a bone scraper, sometimes with potsherds that had survived the centuries. Sometimes he found only a fire pit abandoned in haste.

  Finished with their duty, Manny and Willie climbed back in the SUV and drove slow along the narrow trail. “How do you suppose those ordnance techs found that body?”

  Manny shrugged. When the bomb disposal technicians had called it in, they were certain the skeleton in the car had been there since the Army Air Corps had bombed there during the war. “I’m anxious to find out how a man ended up in a bombing range he must have known was hot.”

  “Unless he died long after this part of the range closed after World War II.”

  They’d get their answer soon enough as they drove over a rise and down the other side, inching their way between two enormous hills consisting of millions of years of volcanic ash and sandstone topped by dried mud shale the consistency of popcorn. A solitary fifty-foot spire, eroded at the base by shifting winds and flash floods, seemed to teeter like a giant mushroom defying gravity.

  Manny thought back to one of the first times he had been there. “Look over there,” Uncle Marion had pointed out when he had brought Manny here to gather herbs. “That’s where Kicking Bear led his band after Big Foot’s Minneconjous were killed at Wounded Knee.”

  Manny squinted, shielding his eyes from the bright sun fighting to stay alive just above the jagged ridges. “Do people drive down there?” he had asked.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “There are cars down there.”

  Unc shook his head. “Practice targets for the Air Corps during World War II. They drug old cars down there to bomb when they ran out of dinosaur fossils to obliterate.”

  Manny turned back. Unc’s mouth had assumed that downturned look he always got when he was saddened. “What’s wrong, Unc?”

  “The government. Kicked a hundred families off their land to use it for that bombing range,” Unc explained as he looked away. “Paid them little or nothing at all, and most never moved back after the war. Nothing ever changes—the government takes from us Indians and leaves little more than a memory of what we had.”

  Manny remembered—or thought he remembered, though those days grew somewhat cloudy as he aged—that he had seen Unc cry for the only time.

  The Durango dropped into another rut right before the road took a sharp turn away from the venerable sentry and revealed a three-axled van idling beside the rusting hulk of a bombed-out car. Three men sat in the shade of the van, one smoking and staring at the car while the other two slept, ball caps pulled low, feet outstretched. A long boom extended in front of the contraption like the long snout of a dinosaur that swam in the warm waters once flowing here. As the Durango approached, smoker nudged sleepers, and they all stood.

  Willie stopped his tribal SUV a dozen car lengths away from the old car. Sand had drifted in broken windows through the years and covered the heap up to the top of the doors. Weeds and dirt had taken up residence inside the passenger compartment, and a scorpion scrambled out from under a dirt clod. Wind had blown one fender clean of any semblance of paint, and Manny counted three rusted, chrome bullets on the fender: a 1940s Buick. Willie and Manny approached the car, and the three men moved away as if relieved of guard duty.

  “Senior Special Agent Manny Tanno.” Manny extended his hand to the man who stepped closer, speaker for the other two whose eyes darted from the car to Manny and back to the car.

  “Damn glad you made it. It’s over there.” Mark Weber pointed to the car.

  “What’s over there?”

  “The body.”

  Manny stepped closer to the Buick.

  “We’re not used to seeing this in our business. But when we found that arm…” Weber shuddered and stepped back. Manny bent and peered inside.

  “An arm all right,” he called over his shoulder, and used the car to stand. “Tell me how you found it.”

  Weber divided his attention between Manny and staring at the arm. “We’re subcontracted by Native American Environmental to work the bombing range. Cleaning up UXOs.”

  Willie had briefed Manny on the Oglala Explosive Ordnance Disposal company the tribe had contracted for locating and disposing of unexploded ordnance in the Badlands Bombing Range, remnants from bombers that had dropped a variety of ordnance, some of which never detonated. For the past five years, Oglala bomb techs had been working to locate and diffuse the danger, and had recently brought in nonnatives to help.

  “How’d you find UXOs here?” Willie studied the ground as if expecting something to detonate in front of him. “This is pretty remote. You just didn’t happen on to this.”

  “You ever see helicopters flying around Pine Ridge, with big booms going out from the sides?” Weber asked.

  “Crop dusters.”

  Weber shook his head. “Those booms house magnetic detectors. We need the choppers to fly over rough terrain like this.” He swept his hand in a circle. “When we pick up a magnetic anomaly, we throw a GPS marker on our map and return to it once we’re on the ground. That’s how we found the skeleton in the car—he was thirty feet away from a hundred-pound practice bomb that didn’t go off seventy years ago.”

  Weber joined the other two bomb techs staring wide-eyed at the car like they expected the hand to animate. Willie dropped beside Manny. On his knees, he was even with the top of the car, the dirt of a thousand wind storms having all but buried the Buick. A whitened arm and hand with a single finger remaining jutted from the dirt, as if the corpse was flipping the world off, final and defiant. Bits of white cloth clung tenaciously to the wrist bone and fluttered against the wind.

  “What’ll Pee Pee do once he gets here?”

  Manny stood and arched his back, stretching. Precious Paul Pourier was the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s evidence technician. Although he had no degree, Pee Pee had worked with Manny many times. And Pee Pee was a talented tech, if a bit eccentric. “After photos he’ll start excavating the remains. Then we’ll decide if we need an archeologist from the state to join us. For now we can release those ordnance techs.”

  “Kind of creepy, huh?” Willie whispered.

  Manny smiled. “Guess this is your first old body call.”

  Willie shuddered.

  Manny slapped his back. “You’ll do just fine. Start by getting their info.”

  Willie turned to the bomb techs and jotted the names of each before releasing them. They wasted no time in leaving the scene, their six-wheeled-drive bomb disposal unit easily climbing out on the two-track. Willie joined Manny already sitting in the Durango. The morning frost had disappeared, and soon the sun would bake dangerously hot. Manny flipped on the AC and leaned back. He closed his eyes, opening
them just long enough to tell Willie to wake him when the evidence van arrived, and began checking for light leaks in his eyelids.

  Whistling awoke Manny and he cracked an eye open. Pee Pee had backed the evidence van close to the car and moved sand and thistles out from around and inside the Buick. Manny got out and stretched. Precious Paul, as his parents jokingly named him at birth, whistled while he moved dirt with a trowel that looked more at home weeding a garden than moving dirt from around a skeleton. He grabbed a whisk broom and half crawled into the car, his thin legs jutting from the window opening. He tossed dirt back over his shoulder like a skinny badger digging for grubs, moving dirt away from the body until a complete skeleton began to emerge. He backed out of the car and dusted off his coveralls.

  “Just like a sculptor,” he said as he stood with his hands on his hips, admiring the bones. “That work of art’s always been there. At least it’s been buried for a very long time. It’s just my job to chip away the dirt, reveal the body for what it is. Or was. I’m like the Michelangelo of the croaker world.”

  “Could you sculpt a little quicker, Michelangelo?” Manny said as he took off his Stetson and wiped his forehead with a bandanna. “It’s getting hotter than hell down here.”

  “Not as hot as it’s going to get,” Willie said. He’d materialized soundlessly beside Manny and chin-pointed to a black Suburban bouncing on the trail toward them.

  “What? Just your acting chief.”

  “And my new partner.”

  “What new partner?”

  “Chief Looks Twice’s niece. She’s going to be a burr under my saddle.”

  Manny watched the Suburban sliding on the loose gravel. “She’s not going to be that big a pain, is she?”

  “Is Chief Looks Twice a big pain for you?”

  Manny groaned. “That big a pain?”

  “That big.”

  Since childhood, Manny had collided with Leon Looks Twice. They’d wrestled in rival schools, got into fights on weekends. They’d clashed when Manny and he had both worked for the tribal police department, and butted heads during the Jason Red Cloud murder case. Now Lumpy was the acting police chief, and in a position to be an even bigger pain. Apparently, like his niece would be for Willie.

  Lt. –Acting Chief Lumpy Looks Twice had come to a skidding stop. The dust cloud continued in their direction and engulfed Manny and Willie, as if punishing them. A petite woman wearing a starched Oglala Sioux Tribal Police uniform emerged from the cloud like an avenging angel, her gold buttons winking in the light. “You forgot me.” She smiled at Willie, and dimples popped out on her cheeks. “But I’m sure you didn’t mean it.”

  Willie stuttered to answer when Lumpy shouldered his way around her. He stopped with his hands perched on pudgy hips inches in front of Willie. “Forgot my ass. You disobeyed an order.”

  “Had to pick Manny up at the White River Visitor’s Center and…”

  “I don’t care about Hotshot there. You were ordered to take Janet along and snap her in.”

  “So she can take my place?”

  “What, like you’re the only one on Pine Ridge with a college degree? Janet’s more than qualified, and with her academic achievements and natural abilities, she’ll be an excellent investigator. And soon, if the current investigator disobeys another order. Besides, this is a tribal case.”

  “Not the way I see it.” Manny stepped around the Durango and stood next to Lumpy, still with his hands embedded somewhere on his hips. “Major Crimes Act makes this an FBI case.”

  Lumpy snorted. “What major crime? Some dumb White guy got himself lost and died of heat exhaustion sixty-five, seventy years ago? Not uncommon here in the Stronghold.”

  “Homicide falls under federal jurisdiction.”

  Lumpy smiled. “If you think there’s a homicide waiting to be solved in that old heap, hop to it. Until then”—he turned to Willie—“you and Janet give Pee Pee a hand.”

  Lumpy shook his head as Janet followed Willie over to where Pee Pee was busy excavating the body. “Thought if I’d pair them up together, they’d have some solidarity. Make them both better investigators. Lord knows they both need experience.”

  “That’s why Willie brought me along.” Lumpy had thrust Willie at Manny during the Red Cloud case, never dreaming Manny would welcome an opportunity to teach a rookie officer the ropes. “And he’s coming along just fine.”

  Lumpy tilted his head back and laughed. “So he’s learning from the Great Manny Tanno, the one who failed to solve the most important homicide of his career?”

  Manny bit his lip, itching to confess to Lumpy that he had solved the last homicide he’d worked on Pine Ridge two months ago. Jason Red Cloud’s murder had been the one homicide in Manny’s career that he hadn’t solved. At least not publicly. He wanted to confess that he had solved the case. He wanted to scream at Lumpy that he had solved Jason’s murder, that the killer had acted in self-defense, when Pee Pee rescued him.

  “We have a winner!” Pee Pee called out as he backed out of the car on his belly. He stood and brushed dirt from the front of his coveralls. Dust and dried gumbo, slick mud and half-wet alkaline dust caked his sweaty face and clustered around his eyes, giving him the appearance of an unkempt raccoon. Pee Pee looked in their direction and smiled. A solitary tooth peeked out from gums devoid of other teeth. Pee Pee had forgotten his dentures again. “Contestants—come on down.”

  “What the hell you hollering about?” Lumpy gathered the hood of his Windbreaker around his face, making him look like a customer at one of those peep shows on East Colfax in Denver. Manny wondered where Lumpy’s towel and quarters were stashed. “Do you have to be so happy digging up dead people? What you got?”

  Pee Pee turned to Manny. “You got your homicide.” He brought a whitened skull, replete with a patch of blond hair still clinging to one temple, from behind his back and thrust it at them. Dirt filtered out of an empty eye socket like an hourglass swapping sand. Janet Grass ran to a clump of sage and got rid of her breakfast.

  Pee Pee’s grin showed even the skull had more teeth left than he did as he placed the tip of his pen in a hole in the skull. “I believe this is a bullet hole.”

  Manny hefted it and turned it to the light. There was nothing unusual about the skull except a clean hole the size of the tip of Pee Pee’s pen in the back of the skull.

  “No exit wound,” Willie said, taking the skull from Manny and turning it over. “Small caliber.”

  “Good eye.” Manny smiled.

  “You get a prize.” Pee Pee grinned and shucked out a PEZ candy into Willie’s hand from an Elvis PEZ dispenser. Pee Pee waved it around so Lumpy saw it before he put it back into his coveralls pocket. Pee Pee had outbid Lumpy on eBay for the original 1960s PEZ dispenser, and Lumpy drooled over it the first time Pee Pee brought it out. Even though Pee Pee was no Elvis collector, he’d refused Lumpy’s offers to buy it. Pee Pee got more mileage out of waving it under Lumpy’s nose.

  “So nearby bombing practice had nothing to do with his death?”

  Pee Pee shook his head and his thin, gray ponytail flopped against the side of his face. “There’s no evidence that a direct hit on this car killed him. I’d say this man died stopping a bullet to the head.”

  Lumpy grabbed the skull from Willie and laughed as he turned it over in his hand.

  “Something funny?”

  Lumpy handed the skull to Pee Pee. “This is what’s funny, Hotshot. This guy’s been dead for a long time, probably since bombing practice in the forties. And like you said, this is your jurisdiction—just identifying him is going to take up a lot of your free time, time you could be using for something else, like being a pain in my butt. I’ll have a nice vacation from your tired ass. Happy investigating.”

  Lumpy turned to Pee Pee. “Help out our federal friend all he needs, though to hear him tell it, the FBI doesn’t need help from us locals. When you finish processing the scene, you can remand whatever you find in that rusted old heap t
o Agent Tanno here. I mean”—he winked at Manny—“the renowned Senior Special Agent Tanno.”

  “You about done?” Janet asked. She stood and maneuvered around so she stood in Willie’s shadow, looking up at him. “If this were my case, I’d have things underway by now. Guess I’m just a little more organized than you.” Her nose came even with a large stain on Willie’s shirt. “And it looks like whatever organizational skills you had went south.”

  Willie’s face reddened, but once again Pee Pee came to the rescue. “Just freed the long bones of the leg,” Pee Pee called over his shoulder, backing out of the car holding a shin and anklebone with shoes still intact. He handed it to Manny, who turned it over in his hand.

  “Looks like late sixties, early seventies,” Manny said.

  Pee Pee stepped back, and Lumpy grabbed the bones. Pee Pee talked to Manny with his single tooth sticking out of his upper lip. “What, you got Psychic Friends on speed dial?”

  “Yeah, what makes you think this body’s that recent?” Janet had recovered enough that she was able to act like she knew what she was doing. “Maybe his wanagi told him.”

  Manny shuddered as he thought of the victim’s spirit remaining close behind. He handed the leg bone back to Pee Pee. “Look at those tennis shoes.”

  Pee Pee turned the shoes over and matched Willie’s shrug. “So he wore Keds. They’ve made them since my dad was a youngster.”

  “But not with those closures.” Manny pointed to the Velcro securing the shoe to the foot bone.

  “You’re right.” Lumpy rarely admitted Manny was ever correct. “Velcro didn’t come out until late sixties, early seventies. This stiff’s fresher than we figured.” Lumpy laughed again and slapped Manny on the back. “And with a stiff fresher than we thought, you might just be able to solve this one. At least this croaker will tie you up for a while. That means I won’t be dealing with pain-in-the-ass Manny Tanno for a while. Be like a vacation for me.”