John Sandford - Shadow Prey

"You know Benton?" he snapped. "He your PO?"

"No, man. I never met him," the tattooed man said, suddenly closing his eyes and half turning away. The tension ebbed.

"All I want to do is talk," Lucas said mildly.

"You want to talk with a gun in your pocket," said the tattooed man, turning back to him. "Like all whites."

He looked straight at Lucas, and Lucas saw that his eyes were light gray, so light they looked as though cataracts were floating across his irises. The man's body trembled once, again, and then settled into a low vibration, like a guitar string.

"Take it easy," Yellow Hand said again, rubbing his face. "Come on over and sit down. Davenport won't fuck with you."

There was another moment of stress; then, as suddenly as he'd become angry, the tattooed man relaxed and smiled. His teeth were a startling white against his dark face. "Sure. Jeez, I'm sorry, but you come on sudden," he said. He bobbed his head in apology.

Lucas backed up a few steps, wary of the sudden change, uneasy about the eyes. Witch eyes. The tattooed man moved over to Yellow Hand's mattress and sat down on a corner. Lucas watched him for a second, then stepped closer to Yellow Hand, until he was looming over him. He spoke at the top of the teenager's head.

"What do you hear, Yellow Hand? I need everything about Ray Cuervo getting his throat cut. Anything about this guy Benton. Anybody who was friends with Bluebird."

"I don't know about that shit," Yellow Hand said. "I knew Bluebird from out on the res."

"At Fort Thompson?"

"Yeah, man. His sister and my mom used to walk down below the dam and go fishing."

"What do you hear about him lately?" Lucas reached down and grabbed Yellow Hand's hair, just above his ear, and pulled his head back. "Gimme something, Yellow Hand. Talk to me."

"I don't know shit, man, I'm telling the truth," Yellow Hand said sullenly, jerking his hair free. Lucas squatted so he could look Yellow Hand straight in the face. The tattooed man watched Lucas' face over Yellow Hand's shoulder.

"Look. When Benton got killed, you got picked up as a witness," Lucas said, putting a friendly note in his voice. "That's on the record. There are some cops putting together a list. Your name is on it. That means some hardasses from Robbery-Homicide will be checking you out. They aren't going to be friendly, like me. They aren't gonna be no fuckin' pussycats. They aren't going to take care of you, Yellow Hand. If you give me something, I can deal them off. But I got to have something. If I don't get something, they'll figure I didn't squeeze hard enough."

"I could go back to the res," Yellow Hand said.

Lucas shook his head. "What are you going to smoke on the res? Sagebrush? What are you gonna do, sneak down to the tribal store and shoplift boomboxes? Gimme a break, Yellow Hand. You got all these nice K Marts you can work in the Cities. You got the candy man coming around every night. Shit, you got guys peddling crack at Fort Thompson?"

A tear trickled down Yellow Hand's face and he sniffed. Lucas looked at him. "What have you got, man?" Lucas asked again.

"I heard one thing," Yellow Hand admitted. He glanced at the tattooed man, then quickly looked away. "That's all. It probably don't mean shit."

"Let me hear it. I'll decide."

"You know that hassle last summer? Like two, three months ago, between the bikers and the Indian people out in the Black Hills?"

"Yeah, I saw something about it in the papers."

"What it was, was these bikers come in from all over. They have this big rally up in Sturgis and they have like a truce. There's Angels and Outlaws and Banditos and Satan's Slaves and every fuckin' thing. A whole bunch of them stay in this campground out at a place called Bear Butte. They call it the Bare Butt campground, which already makes some Indian people angry."

"What's this got to do with Bluebird?"

"Let me finish, man," Yellow Hand said angrily.

"Okay."

"Some of these bikers, they get drunk at night and they like to run up the side of the butte on their bikes. The butte's a holy place and there were some medicine people up there, with some guys looking for visions. They came down and they had guns. That's what started the trouble."

"And Bluebird was there?" asked Lucas.

"That's what I heard. He was with this group, searching for visions. And they came down with guns. Yesterday, when this guy in New York gets killed, I was in Dork's Pool Hall down on Lyndale?"

"Yeah?"

"Some guy had a picture cut out of the StarTribune from the biker thing. He was showing it around. There was a bunch of cops and a bunch of bikers and the Indian medicine people. One of the guys with a rifle was Bluebird."

"Okay, that's something," Lucas said, patting Yellow Hand on the knee.

"Jesus," said the tattooed man, looking at Yellow Hand.

"What about you?" Lucas asked him. "Where were you during this shit?"

"I got back from Los Angeles yesterday. I still got the bus ticket over by my bed. And I ain't heard nothing, except bullshit."

"What bullshit?"

"You know, that Bluebird went crazy and decided to kill a few of the white people sitting on his back. And how that's a good thing. Everybody says it's a good thing."

"What do you know about Bluebird?"

The tattooed man shrugged. "Never met him. I know the family name, but I'm from Standing Rock. I never went over to Fort Thompson except once, for a powwow. The place is out of the way of everything."

Lucas looked at him and nodded. "What were you doing in Los Angeles?"

"Just went there to look around, you know. Look at movie stars." He shrugged.

"All right," Lucas said after a moment. He looked down at Yellow Hand. There wouldn't be much more. "You two just sit here for a minute, okay?"

Lucas stepped over to the tattooed man's bed. On the floor on the far side, out of sight from the door, was a willow stick with a small red rag tied around the tip in a bundle, what looked like a crumpled bus ticket, and a money clip. Inside the clip were a South Dakota driver's license and a photograph pressed between two pieces of plastic. Lucas bent over and scooped it up.

"What you doin' with my stuff, man?" the tattooed man said. He was on his feet again, vibrating.

"Nothing. Just looking," Lucas said. "Is this what I think it is?"

"It's a prayer stick, from an old ceremony down on the river. I carry it for luck."

"Okay." Lucas had seen one once before. He carefully laid it on the mattress. The bus ticket was out of Los Angeles, dated three days earlier. It might have been an arranged alibi, but didn't feel that way. The SoDak license carried a fuzzy photo of the tattooed man in a white T-shirt. The white eyes glistened like ball bearings, like the eyes of Jesse James in nineteenth-century photographs. Lucas checked the name. "Shadow Love?" he said. "That's a beautiful name."

"Thank you," said the tattooed man. His smile clicked on like a flashlight beam.

Lucas looked at the fading color snapshot. A middle-aged woman in a shapeless dress stood by a rope clothesline. The line was strung between a tree and the corner of a white clapboard house. There was a board fence in the background, and in the distance, a factory chimney. A city, maybe Minneapolis. The woman was laughing, holding up a pair of jeans that had frozen board-stiff. The trees in the background were bare, but the woman was standing on green grass. Early spring or late fall, Lucas thought.

"This your mom?" he asked.

"Yeah. So what?"

"So nothing," Lucas said. "A guy who carries a picture of his mom, he can't be all bad."

After the Point, Lucas gave up and headed back toward City Hall, stopping once at a public telephone outside the StarTribune.

"Library," she said. She was small and wistful, falling into her forties. Nobody at the paper paid her any attention.