Blood & Tacos #3 (14 page)

Night settled over the hulking log building with the large sign that read
The Colonel’s Trading Post
. Night lights came on. The occasional car pulled off the highway and coasted onto the concrete pad between twin sets of gas pumps. Others pulled up in front of the building to shop at the small store for snacks and sodas.

In the lot across the highway, more lights glowed, creating pools of shadows among the dozen small shacks that advertised FIREWORKS. Days away from July 4th, the Bicentennial, a steady stream of cars pulled into the lot, even as others pulled out and headed back toward the city, away from the reservation, their illegal booty stashed in trunks and backseats.

A dark van eased into the parking lot of the trading post, away from the booming fireworks business, and disappeared behind the building. Minutes later a short, fat Indian woman exited the front of the store, lit a cigarette, then immediately threw it into the lot before going back inside.

“There is the signal,” Blood said, putting aside a pair of binoculars. He waited in his truck off to the side of the makeshift fireworks lot. “Are you almost finished back there?”

“Almost,” Sweetgrass said. Her fingers worked at his hair, weaving it into a tight braid. At intervals she removed something from the dash board, something that glittered briefly in her fingers, something she weaved into his braid.

“Finished,” she said.

When Blood opened his door, Sweetgrass put her hand on his arm. “Let me go with you,” she said.

He shook his head. “If those people leave, and I do not come back, you must warn the reservation. If I cannot stop them, it will be up to you.”

“Someone needs to watch your back.”

“You will be.”

Colonel Judge Officer did not like to be threatened. And he was being threatened.

The Colonel was a large man, even seated behind his desk. He wore a white cowboy hat with twin braids hanging over each shoulder. A stylish tan western blazer covered his ample frame. His features were strong, if gone to fat. Two massive Indians stood behind him on either side, arms crossed, looking fierce.

The Colonel dragged on a cigarette, and then tapped the ash into a tray overflowing with butts.

Across the desk a man in a wheelchair continued to speak. “After all, Colonel, you said you could take care of things. This shit doesn’t feel like ‘taking care of’ to me.”

“A bump in the road,” The Colonel said. “Nothing more than an inconvenience. There are plenty of women on this reservation; plenty of young, beautiful, and eager women.”

“But my men—”

“Your men acted foolishly. You should be punishing them instead of bringing your complaints to me!” The Colonel roared, half-rising from behind his desk. “They were hardly fifty miles from here and never should have stopped. If they had done as I suggested, we wouldn’t be having this fucking conversation!”

Anger gurgled beneath the surface of the man in the wheelchair’s gaze. Like The Colonel, he was an old warrior, gone to fat. He had a heavy beard, though his head was shaved. He wore the colors of the Gravemakers, and the knuckles of his hands turned white as he squeezed the arms of his chair. Two Gravemaker bikers stood behind him, poised to act with the slightest signal, staring bullets at The Colonel’s statue-like bodyguards.

A tense moment stretched, then the man chuckled, relaxing into his chair. “Officer, you’re right. Goddamn if you are, Judge! We shouldn’t let the actions of a few stupid shitheads derail a perfect fuckin’ deal, now, should we?”

The Colonel smiled, though without warmth. Only his wife called him Officer, and then it was Colonel Officer, and even then only when he demanded it during sex. No one called him Judge. Not to his face, and never within earshot of anyone who may report it. “No,” he said. “We certainly shouldn’t.”

“And the product?”

“On the grounds. Under guard in my trailer as we speak,” The Colonel said.

“Then let’s fucking drink!” The man in the wheelchair reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a flask, chuckling at the flashes of alarm that passed over both Indian bodyguards’ faces as he did so. “To drugs and money and pussy!” he said.

The Colonel produced a flask from his own jacket and unscrewed the cap. “To business.”

They drank.

“And this ‘Blood’ motherfucker,” the man in the wheelchair said. “We don’t have to worry about him fucking with us any more, right?”

“Blood will be … taken care of,” The Colonel said.

The man in the wheelchair nodded. “Who is he, anyway?”

The door at the back of the room burst open in a shower of splinters and wood paneling. The corpses of the two Gravemakers who had been guarding the black van outside flopped on the floor, their throats gruesome, open gashes. A lean, dark form followed them into the room, eyes blazing.

“I am Blood,” he said.

The man spun his wheelchair around to face the newcomer. “What the fu—?”

“Kill him!” roared The Colonel.

All four bodyguards leapt into action. The first came at Blood with brass knuckles; the Indian ducked under the biker’s roundhouse swing and drove his knife up under the man’s ribcage. The force of his blow, and the man’s own momentum, buried the blade so deeply that it emerged from his back; Blood was forced to let go of the hilt or risk having the weight of the man pull him down as well.

The hesitation nearly cost him. The other biker swung a heavy sap. Blood turned away, but still took the blow on the left side of his back. The man was strong, and knew how to wield the weapon; Blood was driven to one knee.

The man raised the sap to strike again; Blood twisted his head in a half-circle, snapping his braid like a whip. The biker cried out and staggered back, dropping the sap and grasping at a spray of blood from his face. Blood came to his feet, wiping away a dripping cut on his own cheek, then smiled wickedly. He lunged at the biker, whipping his head back and forth, swinging his braid so sharply it nearly cracked. The man dropped to a knee, clutching his throat.

Blood didn’t watch him die. He turned in time to see both Indian bodyguards facing him with raised revolvers. The guns boomed in the close confines of the room.

Blood dropped onto his right shoulder and rolled forward, bullets whistling just above him. One struck the side of the gashed biker’s face, ending his death throes with the finality of oblivion.

Blood’s booted foot kicked at the two-handed grip one of the Indian bodyguards had on his pistol, pushing the next shot into the ceiling, while Blood’s other leg swept the gunman’s feet out from under him. The man went down with a crash. Blood let his momentum carry him in a half-circle toward the other gunman. He came up in a crouch, swinging his braid at the assailant.

This man had seen Blood’s hair in action, and sought to defend himself by catching it in midair. He screamed at the folly of his actions when four of his fingers were sheared off just above his knuckles. His thumb hung by a thread of skin and muscle, a razor blade pulled from Blood’s lethal braid still embedded in the meat of his hand.

The revolver the man dropped barely hit the floor before Blood had it in his fist. He fired a single shot into the man’s face, then turned and delivered two more rounds into the prone form of the other bodyguard.

Less than ten seconds had passed since Blood burst on the scene.

The man in the wheelchair looked to The Colonel in time to see a panel sliding closed in the wall, with The Colonel on the other side. Turning back around, the biker saw that Blood had witnessed the same disappearing act.

The man screamed and hit a button on his wheelchair. It leaped forward with a squeal of tires, catching Blood by surprise. The Indian was knocked sprawling to the side. He rolled to his feet in time to see the wheelchair, and its raging occupant, disappear out the shattered door he’d arrived through.

Blood wanted The Colonel, but a quick inspection revealed it would take some time to figure out the mechanism to open the sliding door. Meanwhile, the Gravemaker leader was getting away. Deciding a quick course of action, Blood went after the wheelchair.

Outside Blood could only guess which direction the man had gone. He guessed left, the shortest route around the building, and sprinted in that direction, glancing inside the black van as he passed. Blood came around front of
The Colonel’s Trading Post
and skidded to a stop: there was no sign of the wheelchair or its occupant. Then the whine of a racing motor grabbed his attention.

The man in the wheelchair had gone the opposite direction from Blood and circled around. Now he was racing across the parking lot toward him. Panels in both arms of the chair dropped open, and the splatter and flare of small arms fire erupted from within.

Blood leapt behind a row of metal garbage cans at the corner of the building. A sharp pain ripped at his lower leg, telling him he’d been kissed by at least one bullet.

The turbocharged wheelchair raced by him, bounced across the field bordering the lot, and headed for the open highway.

The man in the wheelchair did not hear the howling engine of the battered red ’64 Ford pickup. It roared across the highway, barely missed an oncoming motorist, and scored a direct ramming hit.

The wheelchair flew through the air as if it were a football punted by a giant. In midair the man fell from it and bounced on the ground; the Ford’s momentum carried it forward, but even though she stood on the brakes, Sweetgrass could not stop it from grinding the man beneath its wheels. The lurch as the truck plowed over the sudden corpse was enough to make Sweetgrass bash the top of her head against the roof and nearly throw her out the open window.

In seconds it was over. Sweetgrass sat panting at the wheel; the door was pulled open and Blood was there. “Are you alright?” he said.

She nodded. And smiled through the lip she’d bit bloody without even noticing.

An hour later and ten miles away, Colonel Judge Officer watched from a distance as a trailer parked in the vendor area of the powwow grounds burned a bright flame against the night sky. Thousands of dollars, with the promise of thousands more, were going up in smoke, but his expression was passive. He licked his lips, then rolled up the window of his brand new 1976 Cadillac Eldorado and sighed. There would be other deals. And other opportunities to even the score with the man called Blood. The car pulled away, headed north.

Blood watched the same burning trailer, from a vantage much closer. A quick call from a pay phone to a trailer a half mile from the powwow grounds put phase two of the plan in action. A squad of young Indians had swept into the night, quickly overcome The Colonel’s guards—who weren’t expecting any trouble and were half drunk—and seized the contents of The Colonel’s trailer, ostensibly there to sell trinkets to powwow visitors. Instead it was full of narcotics, meant to be disbursed to the crowd, in hopes of converting a whole new batch of thrill seekers into addicts. The Gravemakers would supply the product and The Colonel would share in the proceeds.

A solid plan, but for one thing. They didn’t take into account a man named Blood.

“What are you going to do about The Colonel?” Sweetgrass asked. She stood beside Blood, half supporting him and his wounded leg.