Red Knife (26 page)

“Relax,” Kingbird said. “If we try anything now, they’ll kill him. And something about this is still off.”

Manypenny yanked his eyes from the scene in front of him and looked nervously toward Kingbird. “What do we do?”

Before Kingbird could reply, a familiar old voice hollered,
“Boozhoo.”

George LeDuc had come from out of nowhere. While the attention was focused on Blessing, he’d opened the door of the Silverado and, using it as a shield, he’d laid his rifle through the open window and sighted on the men.

“What the hell does he think he’s doing?” Kingbird whispered.

“Go home, old man,” Ortega called out in a jovial tone. “Go home and take a nap.”

“I might do that,” LeDuc allowed. “After you let my young friend go.”

“Old man, you should choose your friends more wisely. This one, he won’t be your friend long.” Ortega squinted at LeDuc and grinned. “What is that you’re holding? Hell, that rifle’s as old and worthless as you.”

“The bite of an old bullet will hurt as much as a new one.”

“You’re outnumbered,
jefe.
”

“There are only three of you. Target practice for me.”

“Only three?”

Ortega whistled and from the plane spilled three more men, all carrying assault rifles. They spread out quickly along the shoreline.

“The rear guard,” Kingbird said with satisfaction. “That’ll be all of them.”

“Old man, if I give the word, what’s left of your body won’t even feed the worms. Put the rifle down and we’ll talk.”

“Let my friend go and we’ll talk.”

Ortega shook his head slowly, as if he couldn’t quite believe this old man.
“Cojones,”
he said and laughed. He spoke to Estevez. “Let him go.”

Estevez released his hold on Blessing and stepped back. In that instant, Blessing tackled Ortega and threw him to the ground.

“Now!” Kingbird said.

“Fire!” Manypenny cried into his walkie-talkie, then took up his rifle.

Kingbird pulled off the first round. A red bloom appeared on the warehouse wall directly behind the man holding the assault rifle and he collapsed. From all sides of the woods enclosing the warehouse came the crackle of gunfire. The men on the shoreline staggered, and one by one they went down, their bodies rent by a hail of bullets and their weapons unfired. Estevez drew a huge handgun from a holster under his jacket, but Cork, who’d had the man in the sights of his Remington the whole time, put a round into his shoulder and Estevez spun to the ground.

“Go, go, go!” Kingbird yelled and leaped to his feet.

“Close in!” Manypenny hollered into his walkie-talkie.

They rushed the warehouse, sending up war whoops as they came, a sound to put ice in the blood of the fiercest enemy, and they enclosed the fallen Lords in a loose circle of readied weapons. Blessing still fought with Ortega on the ground. Ortega had produced a knife and was trying to wrench his hand free of Blessing’s grip in order to use it.

“That’s enough!” LeDuc shouted.

Suddenly aware of the situation that had developed around him, Ortega ceased his struggle. He let go of the knife and it fell to the dirt with a soft thud. Blessing pushed himself free of the man, stood up, and took his place with his comrades.

“Check the others,” Kingbird said, gesturing to Cork and Manypenny.

Cork checked two of the Lords who’d formed what Kingbird termed “the rear guard.” They’d each sustained multiple gunshot wounds and were stone dead. He waded through reddened lake water to where Elgin Manypenny stood over the third member of the rear guard. The youngest of the Red Boyz, a kid who shaved at most once a week, stared down into the face of another kid not much older than he. Incredibly, the Latin Lord was still breathing.

“What do we do?” Manypenny asked Cork.

Kingbird called to them, “Put a bullet in their heads to be sure.”

Manypenny put the muzzle of his rifle inches from the head of the kid in the water, then hesitated.

“I’ll do it,” Cork told his young companion.

“No,” Manypenny said. He fired point-blank and turned quickly away.

Cork took care of the other two, then called out, “It’s done.”

Though badly wounded, Estevez was still moving. He pressed a hand to his right shoulder, where his jacket was soaked with blood, and he tried to sit up.

“Help him.” LeDuc signaled to Gagnon and McDougall, who grabbed the wounded man and yanked him to his feet. Estevez’s tan, Latino face had gone white—loss of blood or shock or both—but he angrily shook off the hands of the Shinnobs who’d lifted him.

LeDuc loomed over Ortega. “Get up,” he ordered.

Ortega stood slowly. He looked at Blessing then LeDuc. “Going to scalp me?”

LeDuc said, “We’re going to give you a choice. You can fly out of here, or you can be burned alive along with the drugs in that warehouse.”

“You’re kidding.” He stared into LeDuc’s eyes and saw that the Ojibwe leader had spoken truly. “Hell, I’ll fly out of here.”

“There’s one thing you have to do first.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Kill Estevez.”

“What?”

“This is the father of Alexander Kingbird,” LeDuc said, indicating Will. “He demands justice. It’s right that he should see this man die. Toss me his pistol.” LeDuc reached toward Neadeau, who’d picked up Estevez’s weapon. When LeDuc had the pistol, a nine-millimeter Beretta, he ejected the clip and emptied it of all but a single round. He slapped the clip back into place, worked the round into the chamber, and held the firearm out toward Ortega. “Kill him and you’re free.”

“We’re Latin Lords. We’re
hermanos
,” Ortega said defiantly.

“All right,” LeDuc said. “Then you burn with your brother. Tie him up,” he ordered.

“Wait,” Ortega said.

The smell of burnt powder lay heavy in the air. The sun, a fiery ball just risen, burned across the lake. The men stood waiting in the charged silence of the morning.

“All right,” Ortega finally said.

LeDuc handed him the weapon. “Everyone clear away.” LeDuc and the other Anishinaabeg retreated a few yards, leaving Ortega alone with Estevez.

The two
hermanos
faced each other, standing in sanguine sunlight, casting shadows that stretched across the ground three times as long as the men were tall. Ortega raised the pistol until the barrel was level with the other man’s eyes.

“Fuck you,
puta,
” Estevez spit at his executioner.

No more than five feet separated the two men, but a long silence separated one moment from the next. Ortega stood as if cast from bronze, his arm outstretched. Then came the crack of the exploding cartridge powder. The bullet pierced Estevez’s forehead, slammed against the back of his skull, shattered the bone like a china plate, exited tumbling amid a bloody spray of fragmented brain, flattened itself against the tempered hasp of the lock on the warehouse door, and fell to the ground. The end of a journey, Henry Meloux might have said, that had been meant for it from the moment it was born out of molten lead.

“Put the gun down,” LeDuc said in the stillness that had returned.

Ortega set the Glock in the dirt at his feet.

“Arthur,” LeDuc called. “You get that?”

Arthur Villebrun raised a cell phone that he held in his right hand. “I got it.”

LeDuc walked to Ortega. “What we have is video of you shooting this man, this Latin Lord, who you called
hermano
. We don’t care what you tell your other brothers, but whatever it is you better make damn sure it keeps them from ever coming back to the Iron Lake Reservation. We don’t want you and we don’t want your drugs. And I can’t imagine you want this video getting into the hands of the other Latin Lords. Who knows what they might think?”

“I can go?” Ortega asked, clearly skeptical.

“That was our bargain.”

He eyed the warehouse. “You’re really going to burn all that merchandise? It’s worth a couple million dollars.”

“We measure its worth differently.”

Ortega let his gaze march across the faces of all the men still standing that morning, then he considered those dead. He turned and walked slowly back to his plane. He released the line tied to the sapling and shoved the plane away from shore. He hopped onto the float and climbed into the cockpit. The engine coughed, caught, and the props began to spin. He turned the floatplane toward the exit of the cove and guided it onto the body of the lake. In a couple of minutes, the plane lifted off, took a long curl toward the south, and vanished beyond the hills.

LeDuc turned to Will Kingbird. “The man who killed your son and your daughter-in-law is dead. Are you satisfied?”

“I would rather have killed him myself,” Kingbird replied.

“This way is better for everyone.” LeDuc spoke to all the men gathered there. “The dead and the drugs we’ll burn. The Tahoe will disappear in the bogs. In the old days, there would be songs and stories about what happened here this morning. This is a different time. What we’ve done can never be spoken about. Never. We’re all in this together and our safety depends on our silence. But in our hearts, we will always know what we did for The People today. Build a fire now. A big fire. And let’s burn what doesn’t belong here.”

W
ill came home smelling of fire but Lucinda didn’t ask where he’d been. She said, “Are you hungry?” and she fixed him huevos rancheros, one of his favorites, and gave him coffee and sat with him while he ate.

“Where’s our son?” he asked.

“He went to early Mass,” she said. “We can still make the late service at church, if you’d like.”

“I’d rather just stay here with you,” he said.

When he was finished eating, she washed the dishes while he showered and shaved. He called her to the bedroom where she found him naked, and for the first time in forever they made love. Afterward she lay against him, and although she wondered where he’d been and what he’d done, she didn’t ask. After a while, he spoke to her quietly. “There’s still Uly,” he said.

Cork and his family made the late service. As he went through the Sacrament of Reconciliation, he considered deeply what had occurred that morning, the carnage of which he’d been a part. When he looked into the cup of red wine at the rail, he thought about the blood of the five men slaughtered at dawn. Returning to the pew, he knelt and prayed, explaining that the dark and hungry thing Meloux had seen in his vision had to be the Latin Lords. He told himself and God that although killing was never good, it was sometimes necessary, and that it had been essential that the Ojibwe deal with the Latin Lords before the youth of the reservation were swallowed by that darkness. In the end he accepted that he didn’t know if those five men had died for anything but he was certain they’d been killed for something, and in the balance between the elements that made the world better and those that made it worse, what had happened that morning at Black Duck Lake was for the best. He could live with it. He would have to.

In the parking lot, a sheriff’s cruiser was parked next to Jo’s Toyota. When the O’Connor family left the church, Deputy Cy Borkman got out.

“Morning, everybody,” he said. Borkman was a heavy man and as he smiled in the sunlight, the loose flesh of his face folded into deep, easy creases. “Cork, the sheriff would like to see you.”

“What about, Cy?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“All right. Let me take my family home and I’ll be there directly.”

“I think you’d better come now. You can ride with me.”

“Sounds serious.”

Borkman didn’t reply, just stood squinting against the glare of the sun, waiting.

Cork kissed Jo. “If this is going to take long, I’ll call.”

“I’ll save you some lunch,” she promised.

Cy Borkman had begun his law enforcement career when Cork’s father was sheriff of Tamarack County. Cork had known him all his life and considered him a good friend. “Come on, Cy,” he said as they pulled out of the parking lot. “What’s up?”

Borkman shook his head. “Can’t say.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“You’ll know soon enough.”

“Is it bad?”

Borkman turned onto Oak Street and headed south, toward the sheriff’s department. “Sure going to be bad for someone,” he said.

Cork smiled, trying to make it as affable an expression as he could muster. “Bad for me?”

Borkman drilled him with a frank look. “What’s the matter? Got a guilty conscience?”

Cork let it go and for the rest of the ride listened to the squawk of the cruiser’s radio and to Borkman, who jawed enviously about all the reports of big fish caught the day before. Borkman ushered him through the security door and escorted him to the sheriff’s office, where Marsha Dross and Simon Rutledge were waiting.

“Thanks, Cy. We’ll take it from here.” When the deputy was gone, the sheriff said, “Have a seat, Cork. Would you like some coffee?”

“No, thanks.” Cork took the empty chair. “What’s this about, Marsha?”

“We know who killed Buck Reinhardt.”

Cork was truly surprised. “That’s great. Are you going to tell me?”

“Actually, I’ll leave that to Simon, since he’s the one responsible.”

Rutledge sat on the sill of an open window, relaxed, with his legs crossed. He wore faded jeans, a white shirt under a navy cardigan, and New Balance walking shoes. He looked like a college professor about to address his class, pleased with what he was going to present.

“You remember the night Reinhardt was killed, after we finished at the Buzz Saw, I made a rather late visit to his wife, Elise.”

“I remember,” Cork said. He recalled the joking speculation that Rutledge had more than business on his mind.

“I figured she was bitter already and dealing with a good deal of grief over the death of her daughter, and once she learned about her husband’s faithless behavior she’d probably added anger to the mix. It seemed to me a volatile combination, one that might drive a person to do something as extreme as murder. Call it a hunch.”

“A hunch?” Dross laughed. “Come on, Simon, you put it together like a chemical formula.”

Rutledge smiled and went on. “When we interviewed her earlier, she told us she usually didn’t go to bed until well after midnight, when the booze finally put her under. She was up when I got there, and as a matter of fact, had a drink in her hand.”

“A little surprised to see you, I imagine,” Cork said.

“Absolutely. But you know me, Cork. Utterly charming. She invited me in, offered me a drink, which I accepted, and we had a little chitchat about this and that, during which I mostly sympathized with her situation. She was pretty well lubricated and I steered the conversation toward the killing. I assured her we’d get the shooter. All we had to do was locate the rifle that had been used, and I was sure that wouldn’t be too difficult since we had an expended cartridge, which would give us plenty to go on. Unless—I added this as a dramatic afterthought—the shooter had the presence of mind to get rid of the weapon. Right away, I could see a kind of desperate realization in her eyes, which she tried to cover by undoing the top button of her blouse.”

“And did her action distract you, Agent Rutledge?” Dross asked.

“A lesser man maybe. Me, I simply bid her good night and drove away. Or appeared to drive away. A couple of hundred yards down the road, I killed the headlights, parked, and hoofed it back to the Reinhardt place, which I intended to keep under surveillance all night if need be. Wasn’t necessary. Within twenty minutes, Ms. Reinhardt comes out of the house, stumbles down to the lake, and throws something in. After the lights finally go out inside, I wade into that cold water and come up with a very nice-looking Weatherby Mark Five. I took it to the BCA lab in Bemidji to have them check for a match against any impressed action marks on the shell we found at the crime scene. We got the results this morning. The rifle Elise Reinhardt threw into the lake is the same weapon that killed her husband.”

“Ed Larson is out there right now with a warrant for her arrest,” the sheriff said, finishing the story. “We thought you’d want to know.”

“Thanks.”

“Some cases,” Rutledge said, “you know what the truth is but you’re never able to accumulate the evidence to prove it. But every once in a while, it gets handed to you on a platter.”

“But some cases you’re never sure what the truth is,” Dross said. “Any headway tracking down Lonnie Thunder, Cork?”

“I hate to admit it, Marsha, but I’m giving up the search for Thunder. As nearly as I can tell, he’s gone from the reservation, gone for good.”

“Do you still think he was responsible for killing the Kingbirds?”

“No.”

“Nor do I,” the sheriff said. “I’m with Ed Larson on this one. I think it was a drug hit. We’ll keep working with the DEA, but we may never know the truth of what happened out there. I hate leaving the case open. I’m sure the Ojibwe will have a lot to say about that. I think what we do now is focus on shutting down the Red Boyz operation.”

“I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” Cork said. “I get the feeling they’re already disbanding and that some of the older men will be taking them under their wings. In the end, I think good things will come out of this.”

“There’s something else I think you ought to know,” Dross said. “We’re holding Cal Richards and Dave Reinhardt pending charges of arson.”

“How’d that happen?”

“Richards got drunk at the Buzz Saw last night, started spouting stuff about beating up one of the Red Boyz and burning out another. Talk about dumb. Seneca Peterson called us. When we brought him in for questioning he buckled in ten minutes. Claimed to be proud of what he’d done. Dropped the dime on Dave Reinhardt while he was at it.”

“Reinhardt, now there’s a shame. Never thought he was a bad guy,” Rutledge said.

“His old man really screwed with his head,” Cork said. “Have you picked him up yet?”

Dross nodded. “He’s all lawyered up, but he’s also feeling pretty bad since we told him it was Elise who killed his father. I’m thinking that after it eats on him awhile, he’ll talk.” She sat back in her chair and took a deep breath. “I’m hoping things in Tamarack County quiet down now. The last week has shot the budget to hell. And I could use a good night’s sleep.”

“Me, I’m heading home,” Rutledge said, pushing away from the windowsill. “Always a pleasure working with you folks.”

“How’d your son do in the track meet yesterday?” Cork asked as Rutledge headed for the door.

“Like I told him last night on the phone, losing builds character. I’m just proud he was out there trying.” He turned with a smile and headed out the door.

In the quiet after Rutledge had gone, Dross turned her chair and looked out the window at the park across the street. “It’s been a tough week, Cork. There were times I wished to God I wasn’t the sheriff.”

“I suspect there’ll be a lot more of those before you retire.”

She swung around and faced him. “Thanks for all your help. You put a lot on the line when you didn’t have to.”

“I’d say, ‘Any time,’ except Jo would kill me.” Cork turned and walked to the door. “Get some rest, Sheriff,” he said over his shoulder. “You deserve it.”