Read Death Along the Spirit Road Online
Authors: C. M. Wendelboe
Death Along the Spirit Road (2 page)
The buildings stood crumbling and bowed, like the broken spirit of the Lakota people. The reservation was one hundred years of history unmarked by progress, and things were worse than when Manny lived here. Pejuty Drug Store, where he had often bought candy as a boy, his patched dungarees full of change after finishing a chore his uncle Marion had given him, was gone. And the Wright and McGill snelling factory. It had employed more than four hundred people, but the owners found poor people overseas willing to work for even lower wages than the Indians. Now the fishhook factory stood as vacant as the stares of out-of-work Oglala.
Then he laughed. “Who the hell ever gives me a choice of assignments?” Whenever Ben Niles called Special Agent Manny Tanno to his office, it was to assign him an investigation no one else wanted. Usually on some Indian reservation no one wanted to go to. “Some choice.” There was a bowling alley then, as well as a moccasin factory, and Gerber’s Hotel, all boarded up now. Manny guessed that travelers were shit out of luck if they wanted a place to stay for the night.
Special Agent Manny Tanno cursed Jason Red Cloud for getting killed and dragging him back here. He cursed Ben Niles for assigning him every dispute on every Indian reservation in the country because he was the FBI token Indian-of-the-moment. And he cursed himself for accepting this assignment on Pine Ridge: He had not thought of the reservation for so long that he had become comfortable thinking it was a place where other Indians lived, not the place where he was from.
It was midday and the customers at Big Bat’s gas station and convenience store stood three-deep at the food counter waiting to place their orders. The counter girl, wearing an ANGELICA name tag, took orders and handed them back to the cook through an open window into the kitchen. Bacon crackled on the grill, and the odor of grease and frying eggs made Manny retch. The drunk in the street was still strong in his mind, the boy’s near-death lingering. He was still pissed. That kid had nearly cost Manny his career, nearly missed getting himself hit—and the news would have been reported that an FBI agent ran an Indian down on his own reservation.
“Order.” Angelica grabbed a stub of pencil from behind her ear and held it poised over a paper pad. He didn’t recognize her, couldn’t recognize her, it had been so long since he had been home. He guessed her age at eighteen, probably just out of high school, if her parents had enough discipline to send her to school. She was rushing, though, so maybe she’d had enough gumption to graduate.
“I’ll just have coffee.”
She smiled at him as if he’d just placed the biggest order of the day and directed him to the coffee urns along one wall. He stood in line as a couple alternated filling their sodas and pinching one another on the butt. They eyed Manny’s starched white shirt, then worked their way down to his Dockers and wing tips. One whispered to the other and they both laughed. They started for a booth when one nodded to the counter. Manny followed the nod. He turned and saw a boy, younger than the counter girl but nearly as big as Manny, elbow a woman aside. Her breakfast burrito fell to the floor.
The boy ignored her and tossed two sandwiches onto the counter. “What the hell’s this slop?” He asked belligerently as Angelica backed away. “Get that cook off his ass and have him make me a new order.”
“That’s enough, Lenny.” The cook, wiping his hands on his apron, emerged from the kitchen. “I’ll make a new order.”
Lenny reached across the counter and grabbed the cook’s shirt. Manny set his coffee on a table and approached Lenny, who had one foot on the counter ready to climb over.
“Maybe you ought to chill out.”
Lenny put his foot back onto the floor and shifted his threatening stance toward Manny. The kid’s fists clenched and unclenched, and the adolescent stubble rippled on his cheeks as his jaw tightened. “Maybe I don’t want to chill out.”
“Let it alone, kid.”
“Just who the hell are you to tell me what to do?” Lenny stepped closer, and his breath stank of cheap whiskey. “You ain’t the cops.”
“But I am.” Manny flashed his badge and ID wallet.
“This here’s an FBI agent,” Lenny yelled. He staggered back, then turned and started climbing back onto the counter. “Ain’t that something.”
Manny grabbed him by the arm, twisted it behind him, and pushed him out the door into the heat of the parking lot. Lenny jerked his arm away and stumbled on the curb. Manny caught him before he fell.
“Leave me alone. What the hell’s the FBI doing here anyhow? I thought we run you off years ago.”
“There’s no one to hear you out here, so you can drop the macho bullshit. I don’t know what your problem is …”
“Course you don’t. You ain’t even from here.”
“But you better get a handle on it. It’s summer and you should be working instead of killing the day killing beer.”
“I got a job.”
Manny didn’t want to talk to the kid any longer than he had to. He’d been assigned to Pine Ridge just for the case, and he didn’t have the time to be a social worker to these people.
Lenny stumbled down the street and Manny returned to the store. His coffee had been overturned and the cup still lay in the brown puddle on the table. Someone behind him laughed. He ignored it and walked back to the coffee urn and filled a fresh cup. This time he took it and walked back to his car.
He put the coffee in the cup holder, started the car, and drove toward the justice building. He should have ordered some food, since Big Bat’s was the only place in town to eat, but he had to be careful. Nearing fifty, his six-pack had become a round keg sitting on top of a tap he rarely used anymore. When he woke up one morning four months ago, he entered a quit smoking program sponsored by the FBI and forced himself to put on his Nikes and running shorts, something he’d not done for years. Running came back into his daily routine and allowed him time alone to work out problems by himself.
Manny caught the only traffic light on Pine Ridge. The light made him wait, made him watch. Four young men stuffed into a tiny Mazda coupe careened around the corner. The driver half hung out the window, yelling as the other three joined the chorus. They skidded to a stop just as a 1970s Country Squire wagon, backyard-converted into a pickup, jumped through the light. The back end was cut off above the fenders, the makeshift bed topped with channel iron. A piece of plywood, which covered the hole where the back window had been, was held into the opening by bailing wire. The converted wagon bounced through the intersection like an out-of-place lowrider from East L.A. The lot lizards sitting on car hoods on the other side of the road whooped and yelled. Out-of-work Indians with nothing else to do on a 101-degree day on what used to be called Bullshit Corner. By the looks of things, it still was.
Then the light winked. Or rather, it changed. Manny passed the girl in the homemade pickup. She lit up a bowl of what he was certain wasn’t tobacco. He coughed as he tasted the oily exhaust smoke and hastily rolled up the window.
He entered the chain-link-enclosed back parking lot of the justice building and parked between an Impala with a sizeable dent in one fender and a Crown Victoria with a bloody dimple on the trunk. Little had changed here since his own days as an Oglala Sioux tribal cop. Dents were worn like badges of honor, since resistive prisoners were often educated on the trunk of a cruiser before being jailed. “Wall-to-wall counseling.” Manny chuckled to himself. He stepped from the rental and stretched his back. Eighteen years had made little difference in his old stomping grounds. The lot looked as if it had been paved about the time he left for D.C. Weeds still grew through cracks in the asphalt. Most of the tribal police vehicles sported old rusted dents and scrapes bleeding through the fresh ones. One cruiser was missing a front fender. Another thrust its bent radio antenna toward the building as if it were half of some divining rod.
Two officers charged through the door. They glanced at Manny as they ran to a Dodge Durango, spinning gravel on their way to a family fight. Or an accident. Or a gun call. Manny thought of the times he had answered those calls, remembered, and thanked God the FBI employed him now rather than the Oglala Sioux Tribe.
He opened the door of the justice building, stepped inside, and let his eyes adjust from the sun that filtered through his Gargoyles. He looked past the long, narrow counter through the bullet-resistant glass. It was the American Indian Movement turmoil that had forced the tribe and Bureau of Indian Affairs to harden the building on Pine Ridge, and violence frequented the police station even now.
A girl half Manny’s age rose from her desk and walked to the audio port behind the glass. Manny read her name tag: SHANNON HORN.
“Any relation to Verlyn Horn?” Manny asked as he pointed to her name tag.
“My grandfather.”
“Small world.” Manny read her questioning look. “I used to work for him when he was police chief.”
“And you are?”
“Manny Tanno.”
She sucked in a quick breath. “Grandfather always talks about you. He was always proud that you left here and made good.”
“How is Chief Horn?”
“He retired years ago.” She dropped her eyes. “He fell in love with White Clay.”
Unc always warned Manny to avoid White Clay. “Some of your young buddies will find their way down there,” he told Manny on the day he got his driver’s license. “Just as their parents did and their parents before them. But don’t you fall for that. Nothing good will ever come out of drinking.”
White Clay sat just across the Nebraska border within walking distance of Pine Ridge Village and, since the sale of alcohol was illegal on the reservation, most Indians went there for liquor. The store owners bragged that Pine Ridge made millions for them. A recent mutual aid agreement between the tribe and Nebraska allowed Oglala Sioux Tribal Police to cross the state line, but short of making alcohol legal on the reservation, nothing would change.
Given all the years Chief Horn had worked as a lawman and seen the effects of alcohol on Lakota lives, Manny couldn’t understand how the chief could succumb to the lure of the bottle.
“He went the way so many of our people do.” Shannon swallowed hard, and her eyes watered. She dried them with the back of her hand. Nothing Manny said could help. It was that same desperation that had shone in the eyes of Oglala men and women when he had lived here; resignation sapped their will. He damned Ben Niles again for ordering him back here.
He changed the subject and asked for Chief Spotted Horse.
“Chief Spotted Horse had an accident. Lieutenant Looks Twice is in charge while the chief is on sick leave. He’s expecting you.”
“Lumpy made lieutenant?”
“Pardon?”
He shook his head.
She buzzed him through the door, and he followed her through the outer office. She glanced sideways at Manny and wrinkled her nose. Some of the younger agents said his cologne smelled like old feet. But he liked it.
Officers in black Oglala Sioux Tribal uniforms looked up from computers, but Manny was certain no one recognized him. At five-foot-eight he cast an unimposing shadow, and his paunch and thinning hair with its distinct widow’s peak poking through was typical here. Only his khakis and the cuff links on his ivory shirt set him apart. Of course no one had seen him on CNN last year investigating that double homicide at Standing Rock, or on FOX when he solved that infanticide in Crow Creek. It had been so long since he had been back to Pine Ridge, even his renown didn’t betray him. It was his plainness that dropped people’s guard. His plainness allowed them to trust him even when they shouldn’t, and people often trusted him with that small piece of information that would convict them.
He spent ten active years in Violent Crime in Chicago before Ben Niles wooed him out of the field and into an academy teaching slot. Manny was slow to admit it, but he might just enjoy being back in the field until the next academy class began. He just wished it was someplace besides Pine Ridge.
Shannon motioned to the lieutenant’s office.
“Lieutenant Looks Twice must have stepped out. Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
“Thanks.”
By the time she returned, Manny had settled into a large, padded velvet Elvis chair. The King, guitar in hand, hips gyrating, smiled at him from the chair’s cushion. It was almost a shame to sit on him, but Manny did, and the chair swallowed him in its comfort. He smiled. This was the first time he had ever sat upon a velvet Elvis, and he tilted his head back as Shannon walked away.
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