Death Where the Bad Rocks Live (24 page)

“That why does the doctor’s office keeps calling?”

Manny looked away.

“His office left a message for you to make an appointment right away.” Clara came and sat beside him. She kissed the back of his hand and held it in her lap. “We need to talk.”

“We do talk.”

She forced a laugh. “Sure, small talk, like what you and Willie had for lunch, or what’s playing on HBO to help you fall asleep. Small talk. We need to talk about us.” A breeze through the open window brought a whiff of Clara’s cologne drifting past his nose, subtle yet intoxicating. From what he remembered Clara’s intoxication to be.

“We have a pretty good life together.”

“Sure, the hour or so a day we see each other.”

“I’ve been kicking bushes on this case…”

“Not that excuse again. You were kicking bushes when we first met, and you had enough energy then. Is there something else?”

Manny looked away, and inside he kicked himself in the ass. For a trained interrogator, he had little success in concealing his lies.

“There is something else, isn’t there? That’s why your doctor keeps calling and leaving messages for you to see him?”

Manny brushed her hand off his arm and stood. “He thinks I have diabetes. Wants me to come in for another checkup and more blood work.”

Clara stood and slipped her arm around his neck. “Your folks had diabetes. Your Uncle Marion died of it. And about half the reservation’s got it. You’re bound to get it at some point.”

Manny shrugged her arm off his shoulder and turned toward her. “I’m too damned young. I’ve dropped ten pounds since we’ve been together, and I run my ass off every night, when some damned Norman Bates of a cat doesn’t attack me. No way I should have diabetes. The doctor’s wrong!” Manny thought back to his academy assignment, to his home in Virginia
he’d fled to after leaving Pine Ridge eighteen years ago. He didn’t have diabetes back there. He kept telling himself city living—away from the reservation—had protected him, had kept the disease at bay. Yet he knew the doctor was right, even if he fought against the reality.

“So you’re not going to make an appointment with him?”

Manny shrugged. “Too busy right now.”

Clara backed away and crossed her arms as she leaned against the fireplace mantle. “Well, perhaps a few days away will show you if you’re too busy to see your doctor. And too busy to salvage us.”

Manny nodded. “Look, the Senate hearings are only a week away. I owe Indians everywhere a chance to have a Lakota Supreme Court justice.”

“And you owe me some time to just sit and talk about us. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but neither of us is getting any younger.”

“Just as soon as the investigation’s over, I’ll see the doctor. Then we’ll have our talk.”

Clara remained with arms crossed, watching Manny throw together clothes in an overnight bag. He tossed in his shaving gear and started for the door when she stepped in front of him. “Promise to talk?”

“Honest Injun.” He smiled and held up his hand in mock swearing.

Her lips brushed his cheek, and she held the door for him. “I’ll hold you to that.”

Manny turned off Highway 385 and drove past Oelrichs, Clara’s concern still nagging him. She was right—Uncle Marion had died of diabetes, and many people he knew on Pine Ridge and Rosebud had also. But would that diagnosis and treatment give him back his desire, his libido? Or was something else nagging his relationship with the woman he’d grown to love?

He flicked his high beams at an oncoming pickup, but the truck kept blinding him with its bright lights. In desperation, he left his own high beams on. He cupped his hand over his eyes and squinted against the bright lights as the truck passed him, flipping his middle finger at it. Like the driver could see it in the dark.

What the hell am I doing?
Back in Virginia, he would have never thought to flip off another motorist. Back in Virginia. Back a lifetime ago before he was reassigned to work reservation cases as the resident Indian in the Rapid City Field Office.

He popped Jimmy Sturr’s
Polka Disco
CD into the player
and cranked up the volume.
Who the hell ever used disco and polka in the same sentence? Jimmy Sturr did.
But it didn’t matter to Manny. He liked Jimmy and his band. The heavy bass drum and full accordion cords reached the inner workings of his mind, strangely soothing him. For all the cacophony that was polka music, he thought best when he was either running or listening to the polka. He had been so tired of late, skipping running for early bedtimes. So that left polka, with its heavy beat so much like traditional powwow music, without causing Manny to commit to being a Lakota through and through.

He tapped the steering wheel in time to the bass tuba between stanzas of the “Too Fat Polka.”
“I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me.”
His thoughts turned to Judge High Elk. It was natural for Ham to be concerned about Gunnar’s homicide investigation. It wasn’t natural for him to have such a conflict of interest with the chief investigator in the case. But this would be Ham’s one shot at the Supreme Court—perhaps the only shot for any Indian—and if the case wasn’t resolved by hearing time, Ham’s confirmation would be in serious jeopardy.

Oomp-bah. Oomph-bah-bah. Oomp-bah.
“She’s so charming, and she’s so winning, but it’s alarming when she goes swimming.”

Manny had gone out of his way to believe Ham was being truthful. He’d studied Ham’s judicial rulings since being assigned the three homicides in the Badlands, and nothing in those decisions indicated Ham was anything but an impartial jurist. Even when Ham had taken heat in the Indian press two years ago for opposing tribal sovereignty; he had defended his position logically with court precedence that dated back a hundred years. And garnered much hate on the reservations in so doing.

Then there had been Ham’s opposition to mining in the
Pine Ridge Badlands. Half of the enrolled members wanted mining to open up, arguing it would be an economic boon to the Oglala Lakota. The other half fought to allow the reservation to remain closed, to stay as it had for the last hundred years, fearful that uranium mining and its aftermath would harm the reservation for the next hundred. That left about twenty thousand Lakota thanking Ham for his ruling. And about twenty thousand pissed at Judge Alexander Hamilton High Elk.

Oomp-oomp. Oomp-bah. Oomph-bah-bah. He imagined short, stocky men dressed in kneesocks and wearing colorful shorts dancing around blond maidens at some Swiss beer garden. Short stocky men like Joe Dozi. Except nice, short, stocky men. Manny’s bureau queries had been unable to unearth any background on Dozi past his college days before being drafted. It was as if he entered the army and the army just swallowed him up. Nothing had been found about his Vietnam service, and thoughts of clandestine missions entered Manny’s mind, missions so secret that Joe Dozi’s name had been expunged from military records. The one thing Manny was certain of was Dozi’s total loyalty to Ham.

Oomph-bah-bah. Manny nodded, the thump-thump-thumping lulling him to sleep. Nod. Two whitetail spring fawns stepped onto the road. Nod. Head dropping on his chest, snapping awake in time to lay on the brakes. They froze and looked directly into the headlights, that same look the Spearfish records clerk had when he asked her about Ham and Gunnar’s original arrest report, when they’d been arrested in college for fighting in a Spearfish bar. She’d produced the microfiche, and copied the report, so Joe Dozi seizing them made little sense. Manny had already read the report.

Manny popped over a hill, and another truck kept its high beams on.
Didn’t anyone ever tell these guys the headlight dimmer’s there for a reason?
He flipped his headlights
from high to low, but got no response. He started to flip them to high again when he shielded his hand from the lights and saw the truck was stopped on the road. The driver had popped the hood, and Manny squinted to see anyone. He slowed and rolled his window down, sticking his head out the window, just as a rifle shot erupted, his windshield spiderwebbing, the round traveling and embedding itself in Manny’s headrest.

He ducked in the seat as two more quick rounds pinged off his hood, another and the windshield shattered, safety plastic sandwiched between the glass holding it together. Manny floored the Malibu into a bootleg turn, swinging the back end around. Shots came fast, bullets hitting the back window as the car lurched away from the shooter. He thrust his head out the window, spotting his escape through a hay field on one side of the road, and he turned the wheel toward that field.

A front tire flattened, steel wheel biting into the asphalt with a shudder. He hit his head on the doorjamb and pulled inside as the car veered toward a steep ditch just before the field. The steering wheel jerked in his hand, rapping his knuckles. The car went off the road and nosed down into the ditch into dirt. The seat belt tightener bit against Manny’s shoulder, the trunk sticking skyward like the tail of an injured gooney bird, steam rolling from under the hood.

He craned his neck around. The shooter, silhouetted against the bright lights of his truck, walked toward him, the rifle cradled in the crook of his arm as a hunter carries his gun.

Gasoline odor reached him then, strong, steady dripping too loud from a punctured gas tank. Manny hit the seat belt release. The shooter neared, bending to the pavement. When he stood he had lit a highway flare.

The seat belt caught on Manny’s shoulder and he wiggled to clear it.

The shooter drew back the flare.

Manny cleared the seat belt and dove out the window.

The shooter tossed the flare at the car.

Manny scrambled on all fours, keeping his car between him and the shooter, dirt catching in the cuts on his hands.

The gas tank exploded.

Manny flung himself over the bank.

The fireball lit up the night, heat washing over and singeing Manny’s neck and face and arms.

He threw himself at a fallen cottonwood, hitting his head on a gnarly branch, and rolled to his right. He yanked his gun from the holster, peeking around the tree. He swiped blood from a scalp laceration, expecting to see the shooter. Intense heat forced him back behind the cottonwood and he hugged the cool dirt, waiting, vision blurred, lungs seared. He started backing away from the tree and tried standing, intending working his way around to get a shot at his attacker.

He stumbled against soft dirt and fell, fighting his way to one knee when the world around him swirled. Before he lost consciousness, he thought how he felt like he had fallen in a toilet and someone had hit the handle, forcing him swirling down the drain.

Manny woke to the sound of steady beeping above his head, and he cracked an eye. Monitors on a rack at the head of his hospital bed kept time with a nurse walking past his open door.

“Welcome back.” Clara sat on the edge of his bed stroking his forehead, her eyes settling on the IV tube taped to the back of his wrist. A forced smile shone through eyes baggy from lack of sleep. She bent and kissed his cheek. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”

“This is the land of the living?” Manny tried sitting up, but
pain shot through his chest and he eased himself back onto the pillow.

“The doctor said you had a mild concussion. Hair gone from your neck and arms. Minor smoke inhalation, but nothing you’ll be able to burn up all that sick time for.”

“Great. I’ll catch hell for wrecking another car.”

“At least this accident wasn’t your fault.” Willie rose from where he’d been lying across chairs lined up at the head of Manny’s bed.

“Did I crawl here from the accident?” Manny’s memory faded about the time he passed Oelrichs.

“It wasn’t an accident.”

“You sound pretty certain.”

Willie nodded. “A couple drunks found you. Two goofballs from Hot Springs had been on the rez doing some teepee creepin’ in Manderson. They were freshly horned up and tanked up as they drove their dates toward Hot Springs for some more beer. Remember a one-ton dually passing you?”

“I don’t remember much.”