Death Where the Bad Rocks Live

by C. M. Wendelboe

  “He already has.”

  Lumpy pulled to the side of the road and half turned in his seat. “Who the hell called him already? You?”

  Manny shook his head. “Someone from your office. Seems like your dike’s got a nasty little leak you need to plug.”

  Lumpy watched the rearview mirror for Willie and Janet following in Willie’s Durango. “I’ll handle this problem personally. Somebody’s gonna get reassigned to animal control—or worse— when I find out who shot their mouth off.”

  Willie came up fast and passed them, with Pee Pee following in the evidence van close on their tail. Lumpy pulled the Suburban behind them, following until they went off-road along an old game trail. Manny chanced a look out the side window and turned away. Lumpy laughed.

  “You always were the squeamish one as I recall.” Lumpy laughed again and jerked the wheel to the right, nearly dropping a wheel off the edge. He snapped the wheel and the ’Burb came back on trail. “Still can’t take it, Hotshot.”

  “Let’s just say I’ve come to grips with my mortality in my old age. I’d rather be living on a meager retirement check than go out in a blaze of glory. In other words, keep the damned outfit on the road or you’ll have my breakfast all over your dashboard.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “I would…” Manny retched and clutched his throat as if he were going to puke in the dashboard vents. Lumpy slowed and turned his full attention to traversing the narrow path, while Manny sat back in the seat and grabbed the oh-shit handle above the door.

  It took the procession the better part of an hour to pick their way down the game trail. Just before hitting the floor of the Badlands they drove around a boulder and something caught Manny’s eye. He squinted against the bright light. Handlebars jutted from the dirt a hundred yards distant. Beside the handlebars a hand seemed to cling to a patch of sagebrush growing beside the bike.

  Pee Pee stopped the evidence van well away from the scene so as not to contaminate it, and leapt from the van. He exaggerated taking a deep breath and let it out slowly. “One more croaker in the summer heat and I’ll think I died and went to heaven.”

  “Just get on with it.” Lumpy covered his nose as he opened the Durango door for Janet. She stepped out into the wind and ran to her own piece of sagebrush. Sounds of Janet heaving brought a wider smile to Pee Pee’s face.

  Willie stood beside Manny and shook his head. “I guess CSI: Miami can’t replicate that smell.”

  “Or the sounds of larvae feeding on fresh flesh.” Pee Pee smiled one-toothed while he pulled on white coveralls.

  “Enough!” Lumpy looked over his shoulder as he rubbed Janet’s back. “You don’t need to add to her problems.”

  “She’s got to get used to it sometime,” Willie said. “If she’s going to replace me.”

  Janet stood and Lumpy handed her a bandanna to wipe her mouth. Pee Pee retrieved his own snotty bandanna from his back pocket and made a production of wiping the dust from his boots. “The King would never forgive me if I got these dusty.”

  “Get on with it.” Lumpy led Janet upwind from the body.

  “She’s a lot more ornamental than she is useful.” Willie looked after Janet and Lumpy as they walked upwind from the body. “Scary to think she’s going to be my replacement.”

  Manny nodded. “She will be sooner than you want if you don’t show up for work. Where the hell were you yesterday morning? Last I talked with you, you were going to give me a lift to the hospital and we were going to conduct some follow-up interviews afterward.”

  “Doctor.”

  “What he say? Your prostate growing again?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “It’s not like you’re the first one that has that problem.”

  “And what did you doctor say about your diabetes?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “It’s not like you’re the first person with that problem.”

  Manny changed the subject and snapped on a pair of gloves. “Might as well help Pee Pee while we’re here.” He handed Willie a pair. “You’ll learn more digging than watching.”

  Willie somehow got his huge hands into gloves that were Manny’s size and stood beside Manny. “Now what?”

  “Whatever Precious wants us to do.”

  Pee Pee walked around the motorcycle, photographing it at every possible angle. The bike lay on its side, as if Joe Dozi had ridden it into the Badlands and gotten bogged down by the dirt and fine volcanic ash that had settled here a million years ago. Except he hadn’t gotten bogged down by the dirt. Joe Dozi had gotten bogged down by a bullet to the forehead, and he lay faceup with that stare reserved for the dead, one arm clutching, black and bloated sagebrush, the other hidden inside his vest.

  “Any guesses on when?” Willie squatted to get a closer look at Dozi.

  “Tough unless the victim’s fresh.” Manny squatted beside Dozi. “A body cools at a predetermined rate unless affected by temperature. I’d give Dozi here a day. Two at the most. What you think, Pee Pee?”

  Pee Pee popped a PEZ and tucked Elvis back into his pocket. “Two days, give or take, by the larvae.”

  Manny walked around to examine Dozi from the front. Insects had long before begun their scavenging, and Dozi’s bald head moved as if he’d been reanimated. He squatted beside the body and motioned for Willie to join him while he pointed out the different stages of insects feeding on flesh. “Think we’re right. Day and a half at the least.”

  “What would he have been doing here anyway?” Janet had regained her composure and gotten back into the conversation. “Not like that was a dirt bike he was riding.”

  Manny couldn’t argue with that. For all the love and attention that Dozi had put into Ham’s collectable Indian, he knew there had to be a compelling reason Dozi had ridden the bike out here. He recalled Benny Black Fox seeing a red Indian chasing Micah Crowder’s blue Pontiac.

  “Grab some vials and tweezers in back of the van.” Pee Pee placed a fresh memory card in the camera.

  Willie and Manny walked to the back of the van, and Willie peeked around the open door. “I got a theory.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  Willie cleared his throat, looking around at Janet and Lumpy out of earshot. “I got some suspicions, but I’d risk being replaced by that female land shark if I even whispered them to the chief.”

  Manny nodded. “I know, been thinking the same. Judge High Elk floats to the top of my suspect heap. He’s been on the reservation for at least the past twenty-four hours and he knows this area well.”

  Willie grabbed a box containing vials to collect insects and closed the door. “Joe Dozi didn’t strike me as an easy man to kill. It would make sense that his best friend could lure him out here. Get the drop on him without even trying. Dozi wouldn’t have thought a thing about it.”

  Manny agreed. He recalled Dozi somehow knowing Manny had entered his shop despite the loud motorcycle revving up. He wouldn’t have been an easy man to put the sneak on. “But why his best friend? Don’t make any sense.”

  “Need a hand over here, Chief.” Pee Pee put the camera back into the case and set it on the ground. “We got to roll our customer over.”

  “Willie.” Lumpy nodded but stayed upwind with Janet, wide-eyed even as she forced herself to look at the body.

  Willie and Manny helped Pee Pee ease the body away from the bike. Maggots dropped off when the corpse was rolled over, and Pee Pee took the vial case and tweezers from Willie. He began picking larvae from the body. He looked up at Janet staring down at him, and he held up a wiggling maggot with the tweezers. He opened his mouth in a gesture of a midmorning snack. Lumpy retched and turned away, while Janet retreated to another patch of sagebrush, the sound of dry heaves echoing off the sandstone spires surrounding the crime scene. She stood and walked back, wiping her mouth with the back of her shirtsleeve, a disgusted look on her face.

  “Welcome to police work.” Wil
lie smiled.

  She glared at him and turned away from the corpse.

  “Any preliminary guesses?” Lumpy had moved closer, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, but not so close that flies might land on him.

  Pee Pee began capping vials with specimens and spoke as he labeled them. “One tiny hole to the forehead. Close range. Powder stripling.”

  “Caliber?”

  Pee Pee popped an Elvis PEZ and offered Lumpy one. He shook his head. “Small caliber .25 auto. Maybe .22.”

  “Long rifle .22?” Janet puffed her chest out, either to distract Willie or to show she knew some slight thing about firearms. “Lot of people use .22 long rifle ammunition for hunting everything from rabbits to deer on the rez.”

  Pee Pee shrugged. “Can’t tell just yet. As you can see, our customer is just a little bloated. Skin’s swollen around the entry wound.” Pee Pee grabbed Dozi’s blackened head and turned it toward Janet. “We’ll have to wait for my autopsy.” Pee Pee gave his best ventriloquist impression as he moved Dozi’s head up and down as if he were speaking.

  “You’re sick.” She turned to Manny. “Can’t you get your own evidence team to do this? Be a lot more palatable than toothless Precious there.”

  “I’m hurt,” Pee Pee said. “This isn’t CSI that you watch every week. We don’t solve crimes within forty-eight minutes. And the FBI’s evidence techs are perpetually swamped. So you got me. Sorry, kiddo.” Pee Pee brought the tweezers to his mouth again, and Janet turned and stomped toward the Durango. Precious smiled after her. “Teach her to forget I got one tooth left.”

  Manny squatted beside the body when he spotted a bulge under Dozi’s vest. He pulled the leather vest away to reveal Dozi’s hand clutching a snubbie revolver in a shoulder holster. He had grabbed the gun as he was shot and the cadaveric spasm had melded his hand to the gun.

  “Make sure his gun gets to ballistics, along with that slug Doc Gruesome dug out of Micah Crowder. Nothing with Dozi’s death makes sense, but I think we may have found Micah’s killer. And let me know if you find any shell casings around here when you dig the bike out.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Manny stood, and his leg ached from the cat scratches, his breathing restricted by the bandages encircling his ribs. “We got our own digging we need to do.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Manny parked the car beside the porch and walked up to the old woman sitting in a rocker. “Hamilton’s not here.” Sophie didn’t look up from the cradleboard she worked on. Porcupine quills softened in her mouth, sticking out like so many needles. She bit down on one, flattening it as she pulled it hard between clenched teeth. Her too-white teeth that Ham had paid for. “He took Sonja Myers home.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “He was going to drive to Marshal Ten Bears’s cabin after he dropped her off,” she mumbled as she pulled another softened quill between her teeth.

  “I wasn’t aware Marshal and the judge were friends.”

  Sophie spit the quills into the bowl on her lap and met Manny’s stare. “There’s bad blood between the Ten Bears clan and the relatives of Clayton Charles. Hamilton wanted to patch things up before the confirmation hearings. Thought if he cleared things up with the sole surviving relative of Moses Ten Bears that he would go into the hearings with a pure soul.”

  “Does he need a pure soul?”

  She studied her project. “Everyone could use a pure soul. It didn’t help Hamilton that his best friend was found dead, even though Joe Dozi was a no account of the highest order.”

  “So he went to Marshal’s to bury the hatchet?”

  “Or the tomahawk.” Sophie smiled. At least Manny thought she smiled, right before she pushed on her uppers before they dropped out.

  Sophie rocked in her chair as she turned the cradleboard to the light, ignoring Manny. He’d get no more information from her today and started for his car. He turned back and rested one foot on the porch. “One more thing—when was the last time your son rode his motorcycle?”

  Sophie put some quills in her mouth and turned the cradleboard over, matching colored quills to what was already on the board. Manny thought she hadn’t heard him when she looked up and squinted at him. “Don’t know, but you’re not going to pin Joe Dozi’s murder on Hamilton.”

  “How did you hear about Dozi’s murder so soon?”

  “Got a call a while ago. Said Dozi was found shot in the head sometime yesterday.”

  “Who called you? Sonja Myers?”

  Sophie smiled, the sun glinting off white pearlies. “Now why would I want to ruin the best source of information I got on the rez?”

  Manny tried his cell one last time before he dropped over the hill toward the floor of the Badlands. He got no bars and pocketed his phone. No big issue. He’d be back in Rapid City before the sun went down in a couple of hours. More than enough time to take Clara out for her birthday. He set Clara’s present, a star quilt he’d bought from Mazy White Antelope, on the seat beside him. The quilt, made perhaps fifty years ago, contrasted blue and white and yellow colors that showed the less-than-perfect star that proved it had been hand sewn, not machine-made as so many nowadays were.

  Manny herded the government Malibu, a carbon copy of the white one that had crashed and burned, around large boulders, keeping on top of the deep ruts, finally clearing the first large pinnacle of million-year-old sandstone. Marshal Ten Bears’s cabin sat huddled between hills older than even the Lakota could ever record. Manny stopped the car and grabbed his binoculars. Marshal’s truck was parked beside Ham’s Suburban, the crumpled front fender glinting fresh exposed metal, the bumper listing to one side like a drunken politician. Manny imagined two cowpokes who had ridden up to the hitching rail in front of the cabin, tied their mustangs off, and sat inside visiting over a whiskey.

  Manny eyed the deep ruts cut by flash floods. He put the car in low gear and kept on top of the ruts, stopping beside Marshal’s truck.

  Manny left the car where it was as he made his way around sage and cactus higher than his waist. Alkaline dust quickly erased whatever shine he’d put on his wing tips this morning, and he beat dust from his pant leg. The wooden porch showed dust undisturbed, thick, the faint trail of a lizard having crossed it the dust’s only disturbance. He bent and brushed his hand across the wood: no one had disturbed the dirt today. Perhaps not since yesterday.

  Manny grabbed onto the horseshoe knocker and banged hard, even though he didn’t expect an answer. A meadowlark screeched overhead and Manny jumped. The meadowlark speaks Lakota; was it warning Manny not to enter the cabin? But the bird swooped down, preoccupied with a bull snake slithering across the road. The snake had nearly made it to the safety of a clump of sagebrush when the dive-bombing bird sank its talons into the head of the snake. “Have a good feast little brother,” Manny called after the meadowlark as it rose in the air, the writhing snake whipping the air as snake and predator flew out of Manny’s sight.

  He rapped again, and turned away from the door, resting his hands on the hitching rail scarred from countless horses tied there. A dust devil twirled choking dust, air-dancing across the rough hills, and disappeared in the direction the meadowlark had gone.

  Manny turned back to the door and opened it. He stepped inside as the fierce wind cut through the gaps in the log structure, whistling past the wood that Moses had nailed onto the west side.

  Manny took a moment to allow his eyes to adjust to the faint light filtering in through the single window. He flipped his cell phone open to call Clara. It showed no more bars than it had before and he pocketed it.

  He plopped into a chair to wait. It had been two hours since he’d left Sophie’s, and he’d hoped Marshal would be here so he could ask his questions and get home in time to take Clara to the Olive Garden for her birthday.

  The wind rose, blowing dust through gaps in the logs. The wind. Always the wind here in the Badlands, wind that had eroded the landscape since before the Lakota
claimed this as a sacred place. Manny closed his eyes to a rising headache, imagining the first man that had inhabited this cabin, imagining Moses Ten Bears. The sacred man lived a life of simplicity, one of sacrifice, praying to the four winds every morning before starting to paint for the day, paintings that could have brought him riches. If he’d had any desire for the White man’s money. Moses’s existence reminded Manny of that of religious monastics who lived a sacrificial life when they could have lived like kings.

  A screech owl woke him. How long he’d been asleep, he didn’t know, except the sunlight through the tiny window had turned to moonlight. The harbinger of death—the owl—warned him of some grave danger that awaited him. He stood, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood with him. Still, no Marshal or Ham.

  He willed his breathing to slow, assuring himself that not all owls were messengers of death, when he heard a faint voice call out. He cracked the door and stuck his head outside. A voice trailed on the wind, rising and falling, coming from a saddle between two buttes.

  He cocked an ear. Crying. Or was it merely the wind, fear from the screech owl earlier putting voices in his head, the moans of ancestors forever lost to this place. This Sheltering Place.

  The voice again, a human voice, as intelligence rose and fell with the cries. The voice grew stronger, more intense. He stepped onto the porch and cocked his head, aiming his ear like a living homing antenna. “Who’s there?”

  No answer, save for the wailing that sounded human. He stepped off the porch in the direction of the sound. “Who’s there? Tell me where you are so I can help you.”