by Shadow Prey
“He’s just seventeen,” Louise said. She seemed barely able to hold up her head.
Lucas put a sad expression on his face. “With that much cocaine, the county attorney will put him on trial as an adult. If he’s convicted, it’d be a minimum of three years in prison.”
The blood drained out of Louise’s face. “What do you want?” she whispered.
“We’re not Narcotics people,” Lily said. She sat on the bed beside Louise and touched her on the shoulder. “We’re investigating these murders with the Indians, like the one with your husband. So anyway, one of the Narcotics guys, his name is Sloan, came in this afternoon and said, ‘Guess what? You know that guy they got out in South Dakota? The guy who killed the attorney general? We just busted his kid.’ And then he said, ‘I guess the whole family is rotten.’ ”
“We’re not rotten,” Louise protested. “I work hard . . . .”
“Well, we’ve got some room to maneuver with Harold, your son,” Lily said in a quiet voice. “The court could treat him as a juvenile. But we have to give something to the Narcotics people. Some reason. We said, ‘Well, his father is refusing to talk, and that thing is a lot more important than another dope charge.’ We said, ‘If we can get him to tell us just a few things, could we promise that we’d treat Harold as a juvenile?’ The Narcotics officers thought it over, and we talked to the chief, and they said, ‘Yes.’ That’s why we’re here, frankly. To see if we can make a deal.”
“You want John to sell out his friends,” Louise said bitterly. “Sell out the people.”
“We don’t want any more murders,” Lucas said. “That’s all we want to do. We want to stop them.”
Louise Liss had been pressing her hands to her cheeks as she listened to the pitch; now she dropped them into her lap. It was a gesture of either despair or surrender. Lily leaned closer to her. “Hasn’t your family paid enough? Your husband is going to prison. He’ll never walk again. You don’t see the people who are behind this thing, you don’t see those people in prison. They’re still out walking around. Walking around, Louise.”
“I don’t know anything myself . . .” she said tentatively.
“Could you talk to John?” Lily asked gently.
“It would really be good if he could just give us a few names. We don’t need a lot of details, just a few names. Nobody would have to know, even,” Lucas said.
There was a moment of silence, and then Louise said, “Nobody would have to know?”
“Nobody,” Lily said flatly. “And it would save your family a lot of grief. I hate to bring this up, but I noticed that Harold was a very good-looking youth. I mean, if they put him in the prison up in St. Cloud, with some men who have not had sexual relationships in a long time . . . Well.”
“Oh, no, not Harold.”
“It’s not like they really have a choice,” Lucas said. “Some of those guys up there are bigger than football players . . . .”
When Louise had gone, Lily asked, “How bad do you feel?”
Lucas cocked his head and rolled his eyes up, as though thinking about it, and said, “Actually, not that bad.”
“I don’t feel that bad myself. And I think we should. It makes me a little sad that we don’t feel worse,” Lily said. “We’re missing some parts, Davenport.”
Lucas shrugged. “They got worn off. And . . .”
“What?”
“It’s a game, you know,” he said, testing her. “You can’t back off in a game and win. You either go balls to the wall, or somebody takes you out and you’re no good anymore.”
Louise Liss was back from the hospital an hour later.
“I had trouble getting in,” she apologized.
“Did you talk to John?”
“Yes . . . you’ll help Harold?”
“If you help us, Mrs. Liss, I’ll do everything I can to see that Harold is released,” Lucas promised.
“It’s some people named Crow,” she said in a low voice. “They may be brothers or cousins. They’re big Dakota medicine men.”
“Dakota?” asked Lily.
“That’s Minnesota Sioux,” Lucas said. “Where are they at?”
“I wrote it down,” Louise said, fumbling a piece of paper out of her purse. It was the corner of an envelope, with a street address. “He thinks this is right . . . .”
“Are there any more killings planned?” Lily pressed.
“All he would give me are the names and that address,” Louise said. “I think it might kill him, just doing that.”
“Okay, that’s fine,” Lily said. “We’ll see about Harold tonight. We’ll call on the telephone.”
“Please,” Louise Liss said, snatching at Lily’s coat sleeve, “help him. Please?”
“The Crows? He said the Crows?” Larry Hart was astonished.
“You know them?” asked Daniel. Lucas was in a phone booth. Daniel, Anderson, Sloan and Hart were in Daniel’s office, using a speaker phone.
“I know about them.” There was a long pause, as Hart thought it over. “God damn. I might even have seen them once. They’re famous. Two old men, they travel around the country and up in Canada, organizing the Indian nations. They’ve been on the road all their lives. Aaron is powerful medicine. Sam is supposed to be brilliant . . . . Jesus, you know, it all fits. They’d be right.”
“What was that on their names? Aaron?” Anderson asked.
“Aaron and Sam. They supposedly come through the Cities a lot. It’s like their home base. They have a son here, you see him from time to time. I went to school with him, years ago. Shit, you might even see the Crows from time to time, but I wouldn’t know them . . . .”
“What about the son?” asked Sloan.
“The son is a freak. He has visions. He doesn’t know which one of the Crows is his father. They were both sleeping with his mother that winter . . . . That’s how he got his name, Shadow Love, love-in-the-shadows . . . it’s like an Indian joke, based on his mother’s last name. He’s supposed to have some of the power of Aaron . . . .”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Lucas said. “Shadow Love?”
“Yeah. Skinny guy . . .”
“With tattoos. God damn.” Lucas slapped his forehead. He took the phone away from his mouth and spoke to Lily. “We got them. These are the right motherfuckers.” He went back to the phone. “Shadow Love’s the guy I saw with Yellow Hand, before Yellow Hand was killed. Sonofabitch. Shadow Love. And two guys named Crow?”
“Yeah.” Hart sounded distant, almost pensive.
“All right, listen,” Lucas said. He hesitated a moment, trying to remember each step of his brief encounter with Shadow Love. “All right: Shadow Love’s got a South Dakota driver’s license and it’s in his own name. I looked at it and that’s how I remember the name, because it was so strange. And I don’t know why, I can’t remember, but something he said made me think he’d done time in prison. Harmon, can you run that down? Check with the NCIC or whatever?”
“I got it,” said Anderson.
“We’ll get some guys on the way to that address, check it out,” Daniel said. “We ought to know something in an hour.”
“Call us,” Lucas said. He gave them his room number. “We’ll get something to eat, then I’ll be in my room.”
“Soon as we know,” Daniel promised. “This is fuckin’ great, you two. This is what we needed. We got those motherfuckers.”
CHAPTER
16
Anderson got the location of the Crows’ apartment and a bonus—a phone number—from the 911 center, and ran them down to Daniel’s office.
“I’ll start pulling guys,” Anderson said. “I can get Del and a couple of his Narcotics people down there in ten minutes. They can check the place out while we get the entry team together. We’ll stage at the Mobil station on Thirty-sixth.”
“Don’t tell anyone but Del what we’re doing. Not until the last minute, when we have the place nailed down,” Daniel said. “I don’t want the feebs moving in.�
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“All the local feebs are out in Brookings,” Sloan said with an edge of sarcasm. “That fuckin’ Clay came in like the President of the Universe. Eight hundred guys running around with microphones in their ears . . .”
“Okay, but still keep it under your hat,” Daniel said.
Anderson hurried away to his office. “You guys stick around,” Daniel said to Hart and Sloan. “If this works out, you’ll want to be in on the kill.”
Sloan nodded and glanced at Larry. “Want to walk down to the machines and get a bite? Could be our last chance for a while . . .”
“I’ll catch you down there,” Larry said. “I gotta take a leak.”
The Crows had mailed the press release on the Linstad killing earlier in the day, and Sam was rereading it as he tried to get comfortable on the battered couch. “I hope John sticks to it, the Indian Nation stuff,” he said. “Hope he doesn’t fall apart.”
“He’s got Meadows covering him,” Aaron said. “Meadows is pretty good . . . .”
“Fuckin’ wannabee,” Sam grunted.
“John’s got his reasons to hold out. He ever tell you his hot-dog story?”
Aaron was sitting at the kitchen table and Sam had to crank his head around to see him. “ ‘Hot dog’?”
John Liss had been twelve, a weedy kid in an army shirt and jeans. His father had been gone for weeks, his mother for two days with a man he didn’t know. Her car was still out front, with maybe two gallons of gas. Neither John nor his nine-year-old sister had eaten since noon the day before—a can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup.
“I’m so hungry,” Donna cried. “I’m so hungry.”
John made up his mind. “Get in the car,” he said.
“You can’t drive.”
“Sure I can. Get in the car. We’ll find something to eat.”
“Where? We don’t got no money,” she said skeptically. But she was pulling on her jacket. She wore flip-flops for shoes.
“In town.”
Friday night. The lights at the football field on the edge of town were the brightest things for miles.
“Must be about done,” John Liss said. He could barely see over the steering wheel on the old Ford Fairlane. They bumped off the road and across a dirt parking lot. The temperature was in the forties. As long as the car was running, the heater would work, but he worried about running out of gas. If they were careful, they could make it back home.
“Watch the hot-dog stand,” John told his sister. The year before, he had gone to a game and afterward had watched the woman who ran the concession stand peel a half-dozen wieners off the spits of an automatic broiler and toss them into a garbage can. A partial bag of buns had gone with them. The stand was in the same place, and a garbage can still stood next to it. Even the woman was the same.
The game ended twenty minutes later. The hometown fans spilled out of the stands, pushing and shoving in celebration of the victory. A tall blond kid stopped at the hot-dog stand, bought a dog and a Coke, and started walking away with friends. After a few steps, he spotted a girl in the crowd and yelled, “Hey, Carol.”
“What do you want, Jimmy?” she asked teasingly. They were both wearing red wool letter jackets with white leather sleeves and yellow letters. John and his sister watched as they sidled toward each other, grinning, friends backing up each of them.
“This remind you of anything?” Jimmy asked, sliding the wiener out of his bun.
Her friends feigned shock while his slapped themselves on their foreheads, but Carol was ready: “Well,” she said, “I suppose it might look a teensy bit like your dick, only the weenie’s a lot bigger.”
“Oh, right,” he said, and flipped the wiener at her. She ducked and laughed and charged him, and they wrestled through the parking lot. Two minutes later, they were all gone.
“Go get it,” Donna whispered.
“Did you see where it went?”
“Right under the stands . . .”
John slipped out of the car and found the wiener in the dirt. He wiped it on his shirt, brought it back and offered it to his sister. “It’s still hot,” she said. “God, it’s perfect.”
Her eyes were shining. John looked at her and the anger that washed over him almost snapped his spine. This was his sister: his fuckin’ little sister. He wanted to kill someone, but he didn’t know whom, or how. Not then. Later, when he met the Crows, he learned whom and how.
• • •
“Everybody’s got a story,” Sam said somberly. “Every fuckin’ one of us. If it’s not about us, it’s about somebody in the family. Jesus Christ.”
The phone rang.
“Shadow Love?” Sam asked.
Aaron shrugged and picked up the phone. “ ’Lo?”
“The cops are coming,” a man said. “They’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“What?”
“The cops are coming. Get out now.”
Sam Crow was on his feet. “What?”
Aaron stood with the receiver in his hand, confused. “Somebody, I don’t know. Said the cops are on their way. In ten minutes.”
“Let’s go . . . .”
“I gotta get . . .”
“Fuck it, let’s go!” Sam yelled. He grabbed Aaron’s jacket, threw it at him, picked up his own.
“The typewriter . . .” Aaron seemed dazed.
“Fuck the typewriter!” Sam had the door open.
“I got to get my letters. I don’t know what’s in them. Maybe something about Barbara or something . . .”
“Ah, shit . . .” Sam grabbed a brown supermarket bag and sailed it at Aaron. “Get as much as you can in there,” he said. He jerked open a closet door, pulled a green army duffel bag out and started pushing in their clothing. “Don’t look at that shit, just stuff it in the bag,” he shouted at Aaron, who seemed to be moving in slow motion, thumbing through his personal papers.
It took them four minutes to fill the duffel and collect Aaron’s papers. The rest of their possessions would be left behind.
“Whoever it was, maybe they were wrong,” Aaron panted as they started down the stairs.
“They weren’t wrong. You think somebody’d just call . . . ?”
“No. And it was an Indian guy. He had the accent . . . .”
Sam stopped at the first-floor landing and peered out at the street.
“Through the back,” he said after a second. “There’s a guy walking down the street.”
“What about the truck?” Aaron asked as he trailed behind his cousin.
“If they know us, if they’ve got our names, they’ll know about the truck. And our fingerprints are all over that room . . . .”
They went down another flight into the basement, then out past the furnace and a storage room, and up a short flight of concrete steps into an alley. The darkness was broken by lights from back windows of the apartments and of houses on the other side of the alley.
“Right through the yard,” Sam said in a whisper.
“They’ll think we’re window peepers,” Aaron said.
“Shhh.”
They crossed the yard, crouching, staying close to the garage and then to a hedge.
“Watch the clothesline,” Sam muttered a second too late. The wire line snapped Aaron across the bridge of the nose.
“Ah, boy, that hurt,” he said, holding his nose.
“Quiet . . .”
They stopped behind a bridal-wreath bush by the corner of the house. A car was moving along the street; it slowed and stopped at the corner. A few seconds later, two men got out. One leaned against the fender of the car and lit a cigarette. The other wandered down the sidewalk toward the back of the Crows’ apartment house. They looked like street people but walked with a hard confidence.
“Cops,” Sam whispered.
“We got to get across the street before everything is blocked,” Aaron said.
“C’mon.” Sam led the way again, dragging the duffel bag. They went down the length of the block, crossing y
ards behind the houses. Most windows were still lit. They heard music from several, or television dialogue muffled by the closed windows.
Aaron suddenly laughed, a delighted sound that stopped Sam in his tracks.
“What?”
“Remember back in Rapid City, when we was hitting those houses? Shit, we wasn’t hardly teenagers . . . . It feels kind of good.”
“Asshole,” Sam grunted, but a moment later he chuckled. “I remember that broad with the yellow towel . . . .”
“Oh yeah . . .”
At the last house, they moved into a hedge and looked into the street.
“Nobody,” said Sam. “Unless they’re sitting in one of those cars.”
“Right straight across and into the alley,” Aaron said. “Go.”
They crossed the street as quickly as they could, the duffel banging against Sam’s legs. They hurried down the length of the alley.
“I can’t carry this motherfucker much farther,” Sam panted.
“There’s a phone up by the SuperAmerica store. One more block,” Aaron said.
They humped down another alley, Aaron helping with the duffel bag. At the end of the alley they stopped, and Aaron sat down behind between a bush and a chain-link fence. The Superamerica was straight across the street, the phone mounted on an outside wall.
“I’ll call Barbara,” Sam said, fumbling for change. “You wait here. Stay out of sight. I’ll have her pull right into the alley.”
“What about Shadow Love? If this is right, if there are cops, he’ll walk right into them.”
“There’s nothing we can do about that,” Sam said bleakly. “We gotta hope that he spots them, or calls Barb.”
“Maybe it’s nothing,” Aaron said.
“Bullshit,” said Sam. “Those were cops. They figured us out, cousin. They’re on our ass.”
