Death Where the Bad Rocks Live (37 page)

The cabin door burst open and Manny awoke, aiming his Glock at the man filling the doorway.

“Whoa,” Willie said, his hands raised to shoulder level. “You been here all night?”

Manny set the gun back on the floor beside him and rubbed the sleepers from his eyes. He looked past Willie to the open doorway. Light, bright and devoid of any thunderstorms. Manny squinted. He offered his good hand and Willie grabbed on, hoisting him up. “How’d you know where to find me?”

“Clara. Sort of.” Willie frowned as he eyed the blood-crusted bandanna stuck on Manny’s shoulder. “She called me last night when you didn’t come home. She knew you’d be there for her birthday and she was worried sick. So Janet and I split up and started making the rounds of the most likely places.”

“Where is your sidekick?” Manny asked between clenched teeth. Willie pulled the bandanna away from the bullet wound. Stuck to dried blood, the cloth ripped away with a sickening sound.

“She went with her Uncle Leon to look some other places. Better let me attend to that before we get you to the ER.”

“I don’t need…”

“Don’t even argue with me about this.” He dipped the ladle in the water bucket hanging beside the bunks and dribbled it over the bullet wound. Dried blood started to dissolve. He returned the ladle to the bucket and began looking around the cabin.

“Under the washbasin. A first-aid kit, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

Willie bent and moved some rags aside and came away with a Johnson & Johnson, the plastic so old it had begun fading to yellow, like an old meerschaum pipe that’s been smoked for too many years. He doubled over a gauze pad and slapped white tape over it to hold it to Manny’s shoulder. “Now we get to the ER.”

Manny brushed past Willie. “I got to see something first,” he called over his shoulder and stumbled toward the first small hill that had hidden him from his attacker last night. A pale yellow shirt, embossed with the FBI logo, flapped like a distorted, miniature scarecrow held up by the cactus barbs. A scarecrow that had given Manny just enough time to distract the shooter and slip away. He snatched the shirt. Light shone through four tiny holes. “Couldn’t tell last night for all the thunder.”

“Couldn’t tell what?”

“If I was being shot at with a large or small caliber weapon. Now I know. I’ll fill you in on the way to the ER.”

“You’d think they’d give a man with a gunshot wound some priority. Even Doc Gruesome would be a welcome sight about now. Whatever happened to triage?”

Willie smiled. “You want quick, you go to the doctor in
Gordon or Hot Springs or Rapid. Pine Ridge has only so many ER docs.”

A pregnant woman sat huddled across from them, a toddler clinging to her as she rocked him. He groaned and held his stomach, while an older couple sat next to her, eying Manny with suspicion. He appeared to be slouching, wearing one of Willie’s T-shirts that was three sizes too big.

“Where’s your girlfriend?”

“Doreen?”

“Janet.”

Willie looked sideways at him. “Funny man. She’s hot on the trail of the dude that broke into my outfit and stole my flashlight.”

“That happened in Rapid…little out of her jurisdiction.”

“She says it connects with the broken window from the week before, that the same man did both. And her suspect is right here on the rez.”

“Does she know who did it?”

Willie nodded and pinched a lip full of Copenhagen. The old couple across from them glared but remained silent. “Henry Lone Wolf.”

“Henry? That’s not like him. What would he have against you?”

Willie shrugged. “He must be pissed at me because I’ve arrested him for public intox so many times.”

“If that were the case, he’d break into every officer’s car working the rez. Besides, most of the time Henry wants to get arrested. At least he gets a warm place to stay and three squares when he’s in the hoosegow. Why does Janet think he’s your man?”

“She found my flashlight next to Henry when he was passed out under the bleachers at the powwow grounds. And she says she can place Henry in Rapid City the day my Durango got keyed in front of the Alex Johnson.”

“But how would Henry get to Rapid? He hasn’t driven since I was a tribal cop.”

“He caught a ride. Both ways. Janet dug up records that show Henry was at Mother Butler’s the day the Durango got keyed at the Alex Johnson and the day my truck got broken into. She speculates he might have heard that Doreen and I were going to Rapid and decided to extract some revenge. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’ll keep her busy and out of my hair.”

“Agent Tanno,” the receptionist called out.

Manny stood, eyes in the waiting room following him as he made his way to the door. Willie stood with him and held the gauze on his shoulder, though he needn’t as the bleeding had stopped hours ago.

“Want me to go in there with you?”

“And do what, hold my hand?”

“I’d offer to hold something else, but you probably still don’t have feeling down there.”

“Smart ass.”

Manny followed the ER nurse through the receiving doors and into an examination room. She tossed him an undersized gown and motioned to a stainless steel table. “Put this on.” She made no attempt to leave the room.

“Can’t you leave?”

“I’d just have to come back in.”

“But it’s not my butt that’s been shot. It’s my shoulder. I shouldn’t need to put this on…”

“The gown.”

She stood with hands perched on meaty hips, and Manny calculated the chances of bucking her. She had him by forty pounds and, by the looks of her, a whole lot of mean. Even on a good day he doubted if he could take her. He unzipped his trousers and draped them over a chair.

She nodded to the boxers. “Hearts. That’s kind of sweet.”

He stuck his arms in the gown while keeping his butt to the wall. “I was going to my lady’s birthday party. Except I got a little sidetracked.”

“So you were hoping to get lucky?”

“Isn’t there some place you have to be?”

“Not right now.” She grinned.

Manny finished putting on the gown and tried securing the back. Like all hospital gowns in the western world, it lacked sufficient material to cover him. You had to be an Eagle Scout to tie the strings, so he held the back closed. He speculated the nurse had given him a gown two sizes too small for entertainment purposes.

The blond Doctor Kildare entered the examination room, the same one that had treated him for the cat scratches. “Wish I got a commission on you. I could retire today.”

Manny forced a smile. “If you see me naked once more I’m going to have start charging you.”

The physician donned latex gloves and began peeling away the gauze stuck to Manny’s shoulder. “I’m not even going to ask.”

“Thanks.”

Doctor Kildare lowered his glasses from the perch atop his blond locks and bent close to the wound. “Irrigate it,” he told the nurse. “And give Agent Tanno a tetanus.”

The doctor left the room, and the nurse went to work. She wheeled a cart close to the table and opened a bottle of sterile water. Manny gritted his teeth as she ran water over the bullet wound. When she was done she turned to a cabinet and came away with a nasty-looking needle. “Now you see why your butt’s exposed. Bend over.”

The thought crossed Manny’s mind that he should resist, realized he couldn’t, and he pointed his butt at the smiling woman with the needle poised in her hand. She’d just withdrawn the needle from his butt when the ER doctor reentered the room.

“He’ll survive,” the nurse called over her shoulder, still grinning.

“We’ll see.” The glasses dropped over the doctor’s nose again. He opened a surgical kit. After working a lidocaine-filled needle around the wound to deaden it, he pinched a vein with a hemostat and grabbed a forceps. He spread torn skin and muscle apart and came away with a bullet fragmentation. He started to drop it into the bedpan when Manny stopped him.

“Won’t do you any good,” the physician said, handing Manny the piece of lead. “It’s too broken up to tell you much of anything. I watch
CSI
religiously.”

“I should have known.” Manny held the bullet to the light. The doctor was right: The bullet had fragmented when it nicked his bone and no rifling remained to compare it with a suspect gun, if he had one. But there was something: the bullet was pure, soft lead. And a small caliber, judging by its base. He’d have Pee Pee look at it.

The doctor had just closed the wound with three staples and dressed Manny’s shoulder with gauze when the nurse came into the room. “Officer With Horn brought you a clean shirt.” She looked at the shirt and smirked. “One that fits.”

Manny unfolded the double-breasted Western shirt that he was certain was too big for Willie. It was clean, pressed, and unspotted unlike those Willie had been wearing. Manny buttoned the shirt as the physician started out the door. He stopped and motioned for the nurse to leave the room before turning back to Manny.

“I checked Frederick’s symptoms…”

“The old man in my room the other day that looked like he was knocking on death’s door?”

The doctor nodded. “His symptoms were the same as that girl of Adelle Friend of All’s. I had to double-check, but they suffer from the same thing.”

“Radiation poisoning.”

“How’d you know?”

“SWAG,” Manny answered. “Scientific wild-ass guess. The bombing range used depleted uranium in the sixties. Some could have gotten into the aquifer.”

“More likely from the Cheyenne River. There’s been some rumor that radiation from uranium mining in the Edgemont area may have contaminated the water.”

“Then I got my work cut out for me,” Manny said, tucking the shirt that was three full sizes too big into his Dockers with the bloody handprint. “No one will believe it.” As Manny left the examination room, he knew how difficult his task would be to prove radiation poisoning. And find the source.

Manny and Willie duckwalked, using the prairie grass for cover as they approached the van. Janet sat behind the wheel with binoculars glued to her face. She jumped when they opened the door and slid in. “What you got?”

She scowled at Manny and smiled at Willie. “Nada. Sophie’s been quilling on her porch for the last three hours. Hasn’t even gotten up once to go to the bathroom. Sonja’s a different story. She’s more nervous than a lizard on a hot rock, getting up every ten minutes to go inside.” Janet laughed.

“That funny?”

Janet frowned and turned her back on Manny. Her arm brushed Willie’s leg as she leaned over the seat. “Every time she comes out of the house she’s got a glass of ice tea or water or whatever she’s drinking. I can just imagine her using Sophie’s outhouse in back. I think I heard her scream once.”

“Probably had a spider bite her behind. I envy the spider,” Manny said, even though Sonja would be a black widow if she was any species of spider. Manny thought he detected the odor
of her cologne drifting past his nose, amazed at how memories can bring good things to the present.

Willie took the binos from Janet and adjusted the focus ring. Janet had had them pressed to her face so long she looked like a raccoon, the binoculars making perfect circular indents around her eyes. “I thought for sure he’d show up here.”