Death Where the Bad Rocks Live (30 page)

“Hop in.”

Manny climbed in back of the evidence van as Pee Pee put
it in four-wheel drive. Marshal crawled in the front and directed Pee Pee along a shallow arroyo between two shifting sandstone spires. The van crawled over a rise and Pee Pee stopped beside the Pontiac. The driver’s door was open and a dark trail in the dust showed where Micah had crawled into some sagebrush and died. Flies seemed to hover over Micah’s body, their buzzing getting louder as the three walked toward the corpse.

Pee Pee led the way with his camera in hand. He breathed in and held it for long moments before exhaling and smiling at Manny. “Don’t you just love the smell of maggots in the morning.”

Manny waited until Pee Pee had photographed the scene before he walked to the body. Manny squatted on his heels. Generations of flies had already laid their eggs, and the back of Micah’s head crawled. Pee Pee fished into his evidence bag and grabbed small vials and tweezers and began plucking the larvae from the body. “Collecting creepy crawlies. Want to help?”

“I’ll pass.” Manny stood and moved upwind. “Looks like he got popped near his car and crawled the twenty yards.”

“Pretty cool, huh?” Pee Pee said, continuing picking larvae.

“Know what he was doing out here?”

“Haven’t the slightest,” Marshal said between a bandanna that he had covering his nose. “I haven’t been to my cabin in a couple days so I don’t know when he showed up. And he would have had to come past my cabin to get here.”

“Get many people down this way?”

“Hell no.” Marshal joined Manny upwind, while Pee Pee whistled as he collected bugs. “I get some hikers down this way now and again. Usually some damned granola-head from Colorado or some Californicator hiking this way to live the adventure only to get in trouble. They get this far before they
realize this land is no joke. We get a few every year that end up like that poor stiff. But I never see someone trying to make it through here in a car.”

“Wasn’t the land that killed this dude,” Pee Pee called cheerily over his shoulder. Manny stepped to the body and looked over Pee Pee’s shoulder as he attached a macro lens to his camera for a close-up shot. “Pretty good-sized hole in the back of his head. You want to see the exit wound, step around and take a look-see at his left eye.”

Manny walked around and squatted on his heels. Except for the eye socket being disintegrated, the insects that had invaded the body as it cooled, and the blackened condition of the corpse, Micah looked just like Manny remembered him.

“Ever see this car around here before?”

Pee Pee whistled as he shook his head. “Never. But then I don’t get to the northern fringes of the frontier, as Elvis would have put it.”

Manny turned to Marshal, still with the bandanna covering his nose. “Ever see this man before?”

Marshal shook his head.

“Micah Crowder?”

Marshal shook his head again. Either he was telling the truth or, together with Joe Dozi, he was one of the best liars he’d had the misfortune to meet. “Should I know him?”

“He used to be a policeman in Spearfish in the late sixties, early seventies.”

“Don’t recognize the man.”

Manny let it drop for the moment. “How long you going to be?”

Pee Pee smiled. “At least until the sun is so hot overhead a new batch of larvae hatch.”

“Pee Pee…”

“All right. At least two hours.”

Manny turned to Marshal. “Mind if we wait in the shade of your cabin?”

Marshal grinned. “Sure, if you’re up to the half-mile walk back.”

“I’ll pace myself.” He called over his shoulder to Pee Pee, “Pick me up when you’re through with your orgasms.”

“Sure thing,” Pee Pee answered, whistling and rummaging through his evidence kit. Then Pee Pee always was a multitasker.

They arrived at Marshal’s cabin fifteen minutes later. Marshal tossed his sweaty ball cap on an antler coat hook before he turned to the water jug and began making coffee.

Manny dropped into a chair at the table and wiped his head with his handkerchief. Marshal’s one-room shack was neater than Manny had expected for being a seasonal dwelling. Two cots were suspended by a length of chain anchored to one log wall, handwoven blankets resting on the bottom bunk, mountain lion rug on the top bunk that served as storage for a sleeping bag, rifle, and camping gear. The north and west walls where the bunks were anchored had wood nailed over the exposed logs.

“Keeps the wind out.” Marshal chin-pointed to the wood. “I don’t think grandfather ever had much mud chinking between these old logs. I don’t know how he survived winters here.” Marshal tossed a match into the Franklin stove in the middle of the room. The door clanged shut and the loud sound was lost somewhere inside the cabin, much like things—and people—were often lost to the Stronghold. “This and a few scrub cows were all my father left me.” Marshal waved his hand around the room. “’Cause that’s all Grandfather Moses left him.”

“Moses Ten Bears must have been a busy man, what with running cows and tending to the spiritual needs of the Oglala.”

“Don’t forget those visions he painted that made him exactly zero.”

Manny ran his hand over the Pendleton blankets on the bunk. “You don’t sound too enthused with your lot in life.”

“Not too enthused?” Marshal grabbed two metal cups from a cup rack on the table. “Why would you think that? Grandfather left my father, and now me, with this splendid Badlands getaway. Kind of a Shangri-la in the Stronghold.” Marshal kicked the wall beside the cots and mud chinking fell from the cracks between the logs.

“I understand the Cultural Committee wants you to move this into Pine Ridge, in that lot by Billy Mills Hall so everyone can see how Moses Ten Bears lived.”

Marshal chuckled and opened the door. He gestured outside. “That’s where my grandfather lived, out there in the elements. That’s where he gathered strength for his visions. Where he laid his head most nights.”

“Then that’s what people would experience.”

“They’re willing to give nothing for it. If it was that important to the Lakota, the tribe would pony up some bucks for it.”

“Thought you wouldn’t sell it for any amount?”

“I wouldn’t.” Marshal opened a tiny cupboard and grabbed two more “I’d turn down whatever the tribe offered. But they got to want it bad enough. Haven’t you ever heard that what you get for nothing is worth exactly what you paid for it? I might have donated it to the tribe if they’d offered a chunk of change. No, I think I’ll leave it here and enjoy the looks on people’s faces as they finally make it down here to see this shack where Moses lived.”

“And near where he died? You think that was him in that car on the bombing range, don’t you?”

Marshal turned away. “Possible.”

“You believed it enough that you gave a DNA sample.”

Marshal handed Manny a cup of coffee and motioned to a chair at the tiny table. He examined his own cup and the
FREE ICE AT WALL DRUG
all but faded beneath the broken handle. “One of those skeletons was large. Very large. It’s almost a certainty it was Grandfather. Not that you’ll be able to make anything of it.”

“You don’t much like law enforcement, do you?”

Marshal stood in the doorway and spread his arms across the frame, standing immobile long enough that Manny was uncertain if he’d heard him. When he turned back, Marshal’s jaw tightened, working muscles beneath into an angry mood. “Cops arrested my old man. Often. Tribal cops and those bigots in Rapid City.”

“I wouldn’t say they’re racist. That might be back in your father’s day…”

“It still exists. Point is, my old man went the way of so many of our people with the booze.”

Manny sat at the table, moving aside last month’s
Rapid City Journal
. The corner of a crude map jutted out of the Sports section. A crude map with handwriting Manny recognized as Micah’s. While Marshal turned to the stove and refilled his coffee cup, Manny palmed the map. “Maybe your father needed arresting.”

Marshal laughed, but his face remained taut. “I almost forgot—you were once tribal police. Dad might have been a mean drunk later in life, but he wasn’t when I was growing up. He was just a rummy that needed his hooch every day. There was no one to help him.”

“Even back then there was AA. People he could talk to. If he wanted to get clean…”

Marshal laughed again, this time his face softening as he remembered Eldon Ten Bears. “Dad knew about AA. He was
proud he was just a drunk. Said if he was an alcoholic he’d need to attend all those meetings.”

“And you blame the law for his addiction?”

Marshal spit tobacco juice outside the door. He wiped his mouth with his shirtsleeve. “Dad died in the lockup in Pine Ridge. I didn’t even have a chance to say my good-byes. He died while I was stationed in Germany.”

“I was stationed in Germany.”

Marshal glanced over his shoulder. “That the strategy—establish some solidarity with the one you want information from. That it, Agent Tanno?”

“Just making conversation until Pee Pee finishes processing the scene.”

“Then let’s cut the games.” Marshal closed the door and refilled his coffee cup. “You want to find out if I killed Gunnar Janssen?”

“Then you do remember him?”

“I guided him on a couple hunts when I was home on leave. At the time he went missing, I was a Spec Four drinking warm beer in Bonn.”

Manny grabbed his notebook, his prop, from his pocket while he slipped the parchment map into his back trouser pocket. “Right now, I’m here to investigate Micah Crowder’s murder, but now that you mentioned him, let’s talk about Gunnar. Your army records show you were home on leave during the time he went missing.”

Marshal laughed “So you think I lied?” Manny had interviewed enough people to detect nervousness in Marshal’s question.

Manny shrugged. “Apparently. What other explanation is there?”

“So now I’m a suspect? People make honest mistakes. I thought I was back in Germany when Gunnar went missing.”

Manny flipped pages that had no writing on them. “You
could have had the opportunity to kill Gunnar. Either lure him here to your cabin, or lead him off into the Badlands and shoot him. With something like that .22 hanging on your wall.”

Marshal snatched the rifle from the deer antlers and turned toward Manny. The muzzle crossed his midsection for a brief moment before Marshal unscrewed the magazine tube in the butt. He tipped the rifle up and shells fell into his hand. He handed both the rifle and ammunition to Manny. “Lot of people here have .22s. Great hunting gun.”

“And poaching?”

Marshal smiled. “Just take the gun and ammo and do whatever ballistic test you need. I got nothing to hide. I didn’t kill Gunnar.”

“Not him I’m thinking of.” Manny set the gun on the bunk and pocketed the bullets. “It’s Micah Crowder.”

“Told you already, I never met the man.”

“Then what’s this?” Manny retrieved the parchment map from his pocket and handed it to Marshal. “Found this on your table just now. It’s Micah’s handwriting.”

Marshal grabbed the map and tossed it back onto the table. “I was wondering myself how it got here. I saw it earlier when I got here.”

“How did it come to be on your table?”

“Look, I leave the cabin unlocked, in case some fool hiking out here gets in trouble and needs a place to rest up.”

Manny smiled. “You don’t strike me as the Good Samaritan type.”

“Ain’t. It’s just the right thing to do. There isn’t anything worth stealing so I keep the cabin unlocked. Micah Crowder must have come in here. Left the map on the table.”

“Perhaps you’re right. We’ll leave it for now.”

Manny grabbed the map and opened the door, orienting the map to the landscape. Twin buttes guarded a deep arroyo
that had been circled on the parchment. “What’s down that gully?” Manny pointed out the door.

Marshal glanced at the paper for the first time and frowned as he turned the paper to the light. “That’s the place where the bad rocks live.”

“Tell me about them.”

Marshal chin-pointed to the west. “Just an old legend Dad told me about that my grandfather told him once.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

Marshal’s face softened. He pinched tobacco in his lower lip and offered Manny a pinch, but he waved it away. “Grandfather Moses had disappeared by the time I was born, but Dad told me stories. When he could remember them between drinking bouts. Grandfather claimed bad rocks lived there. Guess it was just like his visions—something his imagination came up with.”

Manny’s stomach growled and he reached in his jacket pocket for a Tanka Bar. He offered to share with Marshal, but he shook his head as he pointed to his lip swollen with Copenhagen. “That’s too healthy. I’m too busy helping myself into an early grave.”

“Been there. But you got to be proud of your grandfather. He was a wonderful role model for traditional Lakota ways.”

Marshal spit tobacco on top of a lizard crawling inside the cabin to escape the heat then ground it with his boot. “Grandpa Moses fought to keep traditions alive when everyone around him was conforming to the ways of the
wasicu
.”

“Assimilation. My uncle Marion told me horror stories of the boarding school he was forced to attend until he ran away once too many times. After that they told him good riddance.”
Unc, you clung to the traditional ways until you died from the White man’s disease, until you succumbed to diabetes.
Manny turned away from Marshal when tears began forming in his eyes.