Adrian McKinty - Hidden River

“Alex, David was asking what sports we play in Australia,” John said, giving me a nudge.

“Oh, lots of sports, Australian Rules football, cricket, rugby, that sort of thing, you don’t play them in America,” I said.

“You’ll never guess what my favorite sport is,” Redhorse said with a big grin.

John shrugged.

“Go on, guess,” Redhorse said, nodding.

“I don’t know, baseball?” I suggested.

“No. Think about it, what would be the most unlikely sport I could play?” he said, barely able to contain a chuckle.

“I really don’t know, football, I mean, soccer,” I said.

“No, basketball,” he said impatiently, and then cracked up laughing.

Neither John nor I got the joke.

“Don’t you see?” he said, choking with giggles.

“Not really,” John said.

“You have to be six foot plus. Seven foot plus. Jeez. I thought basketball was big in Australia, that’s what I heard, I heard it was getting big over there,” Redhorse said.

“Oh, oh, yeah, it is, sure we watch it, don’t we, Alex?” John said.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, regretting this whole Australian thing now.

“What’s your favorite NBA team?” Redhorse asked without suspicion.

“Um, favorite team, well, um, oh yeah, I like the, uh, Harlem Globetrotters, they’re pretty good, they always seem to win,” John said, and I nodded in agreement.

Redhorse looked at us strangely for a second and decided to change the subject.

“So are you boys students?”

“Yes, we’re on our gap year, we’re traveling the world before going back to university,” I said.

“Yeah, like I say, love to do that, but you can’t go by boat, it’s too expensive. Besides, I don’t like to be away from the reservation for too long, my family lives there, I am the only one that lives in Denver.”

“You’re an Indian?” John asked.

“Yes.”

“Cool,” John said.

“From what I read, the Native Americans around Denver got treated pretty rough,” I said.

“I suppose you read about the Sand Creek Massacre,” Redhorse muttered, and threw away his cigarette, immediately lighting another.

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s good that people know that history, but it’s the wrong focus, there were many little massacres and killings that never got recorded, they stole all this land from us, Denver is stolen land, these mountains are stolen land, not that we claimed to own them, we were the guardians of it, the white man claims to own it,” Redhorse explained quickly and deliberately like he’d said this all before many times.

“Is that what you do for a living, then? You’re a lawyer, an advocacy person?” I asked him.

“No, no, I’m a cop,” Redhorse said with a little grin.

John looked at me, froze. I shook my head slightly. We weren’t going to react, we weren’t going to run for it, we weren’t going to do anything stupid at all.

“You’re a policeman?” John asked hesitantly.

“Yes.”

“What type, like traffic or drugs or—”

“I’m a homicide detective,” he said flatly.

“You’re a homicide detective?” I found myself asking.

“Yes, I know what you’re thinking, I’m too short to impress people, I can’t intimidate witnesses, that sort of thing?” Redhorse said, again, like he’d done this speech many times before too.

“No, I wasn’t thinking that.”

“No? Well, a lot of people do think that, they think I’m too short and they think because I’m an Indian and my parents live on a reservation that I get drunk all the time. Well, they don’t and I don’t and I’ve got one of the highest clearance rates in the department.”

“I’m sure you have, I wasn’t thinking any of those things, I’m sure you’re a great detective,” I said.

“I am,” he agreed.

“W-what are you working on at the moment?” I asked.

John had turned white, lapsed into silence; he was sucking desperately on his cigarette and generally drawing attention to himself.

“Where’s that train?” he was mumbling quietly.

“Oh, well, I’m running the RH department. Not leading any particular case,” he said.

“Ok,” I said. “What’s RH?”

“Robbery Homicide,” he said flatly.

“No interesting cases you can talk about?”

“Well, my big headache is a felonious assault that’s become a murder now the victim’s died. The lawyers are saying that the suspect didn’t have his Miranda rights read to him in Chinese within twenty-four hours of his arrest. Both victim and suspect were Chinese. A lot of eyewitnesses, but we might have to let him go. That sort of thing is out of our hands, though. DA’s problem, not ours. Still, if he gets off, it’s in our files. It makes me crazy.”

He shook his head, clenched his fists, obviously upsetting him a bit to think about this, to think about guilty men getting away with a terrible crime. I smiled nervously.

“Where is that bloody train?” John said again.

I smoked and told myself to relax. The cop seemed ok. Like most cops, he’d want to complain about his work. The best thing to do was ease him by keeping him talking until the train came. Still, my mind wasn’t thinking as clearly as it could and we had obviously fucked up somehow by mentioning the Harlem Globetrotters. Any question would do.

“So this Miranda, whatever happened to him? You always hear about the Miranda rights on TV. NYPD Blue, Law and Order, all that, but you never hear about Miranda. He must have got off because they didn’t read him his rights? Is that right?” I said.

“Yeah, it is, Ernesto Miranda got away with kidnap, torture, and rape on a retarded girl. Shit, man. But the story has a happy ending,” Redhorse said with grim satisfaction, his eyes lighting up, so that even in the moonlight I could tell they were a deep brown.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, a few years later he got stabbed to death in a bar. Nice play, I’d do the same if it was my kid, wait a few years, kill the bastard.”

“Yeah,” I said.

And it was only then I remembered my phone call to the police department. That was only this morning? Detective Redhorse. Jesus. And he was a good ’un. I could see he was a digger. He was one of those who would keep after you. And was he here just by chance? No. Bad cops believe in coincidence. At Denver he got on the train with us. He got off with us at Fraser and was now going back to Denver with us. I looked at him. Not coincidence. This was the type who played a hunch. Hear about two guys running from a murder scene. Go to the train station, follow a couple of guys, see what happens.

“What happened to your shoulder?” he asked sharply.

“What?”

“You’re bleeding.”

I looked at my shoulder and, sure enough, blood was soaking through the paper towels and onto my jacket. Just a spatter or two. I decided to play it casual.

“You know anything about first aid?” I asked.

“A little.”

“Yeah, we were climbing up some rocks in Boulder yesterday,” I began, but Redhorse interrupted.

“You don’t need to finish, you didn’t have the proper equipment, you fell, am I right?” Redhorse asked, shaking his head.

“Uh, yeah,” I said, trying to sound embarrassed.

“It’s always the same, you don’t know how many kids get injured every year. Some die, you know. You kids, you just can’t go off into the mountains unprepared. Wow, it’s always the same. So dry around here too, because of the drought, tree limb, root can just snap on you. Better let me take a look at it,” Redhorse said with a sigh.

It would be suspicious to refuse, so I rolled down my T-shirt and bent down so he could take a look. John staring at me aghast. I shot him a glance to bloody play it cool.