Death Along the Spirit Road (37 page)

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Authors: C. M. Wendelboe

BOOK: Death Along the Spirit Road
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Manny read concern in her eyes. Or disappointment. He wasn’t sure. What he was sure of was that he wasn’t certain he wanted go back to Quantico after all.
“I’m close,” he said abruptly.
“Then you have new leads?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know?”
Manny knew from a hundred other investigations that he had all the information he needed to find the killer, he just had to put it all together. “Just a feeling.”
“Then you’ll leave and go back to Virginia in time for the next academy class?”
Manny nodded. “Have you ever been there?”
Clara shook her head. “I’m just a Western hick.”
“Then maybe you could go back with me. I have extra rooms, too. There’s so much to see. So much you could experience …”
“I’d be like a female Crocodile Dundee.” She forced a smile. “If I’d ever get to the city, I’m afraid I’d wither and fall to pieces. I’m not sure if I could take all that commotion. Besides”—she frowned—“I’d worry about you even more, with crime the way it is back there. I don’t have any right to be, but I’m uncomfortable with you having the job of solving these types of crimes. The danger …”
“I’ve been attacked more in this one trip on Pine Ridge than I ever was in the D.C. area.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
After they finished their tea, Clara stood and took his hand. She led him down a short hallway. “Your room,” she said. A double bed was fitted with sheets depicting a prairie scene. A mission oak dresser matched the headboard. Manny estimated the set to be at least a hundred years old.
Above the dresser an oval mirror hovered, secured between two uprights that allowed it to tilt. As Manny hoisted his overnight bag on the dresser, he noticed his reflection. Heavy bags had formed under his eyes, and he appeared to have aged ten years in the ten days since returning to Pine Ridge. “I need to splash some water in my face or something,” he said.
“In back of you. Your bath.”
He saw it in the mirror and turned to face her. “Thank you for the room. And for the evening. I needed to wind down a little.”
She laughed. “I should be thanking you. It’s been a long time since I thought of a man other than in a business sense.”
Manny felt his face flush again, but Clara didn’t give him time to recover. She took his face in her hands, and drew him close. Her lips brushed his, then she kissed him. He kissed her back, reveling in the softness of her skin, in her perfume that seemed to draw them together. Then they both eased back a step.
“Whew,” Clara looked wide-eyed like a schoolgirl just caught with the town Romeo in back of the barn. “I could get carried away.”
“Me, too.”
She smiled. “Yes, some day. Now we both have to get some shut-eye.”
“Good night.” Manny watched the sway of her hips as she walked away from him. He turned to his overnight bag and grabbed his toothpaste. As he started for his bathroom, he thought that, in the morning, he would shave especially close. Just for Clara.
 
Manny fell asleep the moment his head hit the pillow. His mind wandered and drifted, his body detached from his mind. He was reliving the vision from his sweat with Reuben, when a distant familiar voice called faintly to him. Manny tried to open his eyes when the hollow voice talked to him, and he probed the recesses of his mind for the origin.
The mist faded, and a figure appeared blanketed by fog. The
wanagi
. The ghost of someone recently dead beckoned him. In the recesses of his memory, Unc told him that should he ever encounter a
wanagi
, he had to run. Run—not walk—away, because the ghost, the soul of the dead, wants company and will do whatever it takes to trick the living into joining him. Manny couldn’t fight the pull, couldn’t fight his mind following the
wanagi
south toward the Spirit Road.
A face appeared for a brief moment in this indeterminate time, a face he would never forget. A face etched in his memory. In a crime scene photo. Jason Red Cloud’s face was contorted. Gruesome. A war club dripping blood and brain matter protruded from his skull. Manny followed him, now running to catch up, but Jason’s
wanagi
remained just out of reach. Manny called, stretching out his hands, almost touching the vision. Crying. Crying. Crying for that vision that eluded him as a boy. Breaths came in great heaves in his chest. Manny’s heart raced at the
wanagi
’s presence, yet he cried out a final time. “Wait!”
Manny felt himself being pulled back to the here and now. The
wanagi
grew fainter in the distance, and Manny gasped as someone shook him roughly by the shoulders. “Manny!” Clara shouted. “Manny, wake up.”
He reached a final time for the
wanagi
as it melted into the mist. His eyes fluttered open. Clara sat on the bed, bent over him, shaking him. “Manny!”
He coughed hard, fighting to normalize his breathing, and the intense pain from his cracked ribs helped to bring him back. His bounding heart threatened to burst from his chest, and for once he was grateful that he had quit smoking. “I’m awake.” He gulped and tried to sit up, but fell back down on the bed.
Clara put her hand behind his back and helped him sit, then propped a pillow behind his neck. “You had some kind of nightmare, but it’s all right now.”
“Yes. Some kind of nightmare.” He wanted to leave it there, but he began telling Clara about his vision, about the many times he had seen the apparition, when he had not known the spirit or what it wanted from him. He told her he now knew it was Jason’s
wanagi
that kept appearing in his dreams.
“He’ll leave me alone once I solve his murder. I know that now.” Manny had to solve this homicide, for a reason more important than any Niles could dangle in front of him. Jason’s
wanagi
, and his wandering soul, made it personal.
Clara walked to the bathroom and soon she returned with a cool washcloth. She ran it over Manny’s sweating face and neck. “Did he give you anything that might help your case?”
Manny thought of that for the first time. Unc taught him the old Lakota ways, about teachings in a time that most Oglala forgot or chose to forget. “Jason died unexpectedly, and no one performed the
Wanagi Yuhapi
for him, the Ghost Keeping ceremony. The fact that he still lingers here tells me someone wept for him, someone prayed for him.”
“But who would do that? Jason had no family, no friends.”
“Even the bandit has his confessor,” he quoted an old Welsh saying. “Someone must have felt some pity for him.”
Clara nodded as she put the washcloth on the nightstand, then shut off the light. She lay on the bed beside Manny and held him. What was absent now was the stirring in the loins, as the Big Bellies had a way of saying, and Manny felt content to be cradled in Clara’s arms, and to drift off to a dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER 20
 
 
Willie closed the break-room door. He grabbed a chair and sat backward, his arms threatening to rip his uniform shirt. “You’re asking a lot. I feel like I’m betraying my entire family.”
“I know how you feel, but we need that information and Elizabeth won’t talk to me. You heard her the last time we spoke in that interview.” Anger in Elizabeth’s voice had cut him short with resentments going back farther than Manny realized, and he knew she wouldn’t talk with him again.
Willie reached over to the coffeepot and emptied the dregs into a ROSEBUD POWWOW cup. It flowed so slowly that it appeared curdled, but Willie drank it without mention as he stared at the floor. “Why would she tell me? If she’s kept quiet all these years about Jason paying Alex Jumping Bull, aka Clifford Coyote, she’ll clam up on me, too. She knows honor is important, even more than loyalty to one’s
tiospaye
. She knows it would be my duty to report what she said. She knows I would.”
Manny paced the room. “Nothing she tells you will affect her outcome. She knows that as well. After her psych eval, she’ll be ruled incompetent to stand trial. This is her chance to get everything off her chest. If the question is posed in the right way.”
Willie drank the rest of his coffee and wiped a hand across his lips. “All right. I’ll do what I can.”
“I know you will,” Manny smiled. “Did you get a chance to check in with Desirée?”
“She’ll be all right. The lieutenant put a guard on her after they admitted her to the hospital. He talked with her for quite a while today. Guess she’s still scared to death of Jack Little Boy.”
“Any word of him?”
Willie shook his head and his hand dropped to his gun as if he expected Jack to come into the room at any moment. “We’ve been hunting him, but there’s still enough AIM sympathizers living here that’ll hide him out if they figure he’s got a hard-on for an FBI agent.”
“Guess you guys are doing all you can. Now tell me what you found out about the murders here in the 1970s.”
“Not much. Sixty-odd murders here on the rez in the three years following the AIM occupation of Wounded Knee. AIM blamed Wilson’s goons, and Wilson’s men pointed the finger at AIM. Most victims were killed by gunshot, but just one with a .45. Ballistics showed the slug measured .451 inches. A .45 auto round, not one from an old Army Colt. You still think Jason might have used that gun to kill someone here before?”
“I don’t know what to think. From what Clara said, Jason might have been a real horse’s ass, but he wasn’t violent. Still, we’d better check out old files: Somewhere around here I bet there’s a cold case or two involving that old hogleg as the murder weapon.”
“Already checked,” Willie said. “There’s no unsolved homicides here on Pine Ridge involving a .45. Maybe Soske will dig up something from Pennington County. Or the sheriff in Hot Springs.”
“Maybe,” Manny answered. Willie had asked Soske if he could research their homicides for the past thirty years, from when Jason was active in AIM, for anyone killed with a .45 Colt. Ditto for the Fall River County Sheriff’s Office. Manny hoped someone in the two counties bordering Pine Ridge might have an old homicide involving a .45.
Manny and Willie sat silent. They had no more to say. Manny had asked Willie to betray his aunt, and he had agreed. Manny hoped by the time he returned from talking with Reuben, Willie would have the answers he needed. He started for the door, and Willie called out after him.
“Be careful when you see him.”
“Careful of my own brother? Now why would a sacred man hurt me?”
Manny had started to leave when Lumpy called to him. “Come in here, Hotshot.”
Manny turned around and walked into Lumpy’s office. Nathan Yellow Horse sat across from Lumpy and smiled at him as if they shared a secret. They did. “Nathan’s been in contact with Ben Niles. He ordered you to give Nathan an exclusive.”
“Just to offset that skirt from the
Rapid City Journal
,” Nathan said. “The one you’ve been feeding information to—in exchange for what, I can only assume.”
Manny started for Nathan, but the reporter jumped back in his chair just as Lumpy stepped between them. “Don’t blame Nathan, here. You’re the one that’s been chasing her.”
Manny sighed deeply and pulled up a chair across from Nathan. “I only have time for a few questions. Alone.”

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