Red Knife (11 page)

Stevie shook his head. “With bullies there’s always something to be afraid of.”

Cork said, “What scared me most was that you might get hurt.”

“I’m not afraid.”

Cork understood that this was true at the moment and he was proud of his son. Jo stood up and kissed Stevie’s cheek. “You need rest. If you have any trouble in the night, you wake us up, okay?”

“Okay.”

Cork leaned down and kissed his son’s forehead. “I love you, guy.”

“I love you, Dad.”

“Light on?”

“Maybe for a little while,” Stevie said.

Jo went to the bathroom, where Cork heard water running in the sink and the sound of an electric toothbrush. He headed to the bedroom and took the small suitcase from the shelf in the closet. He’d half filled it when he heard Jo leave the bathroom. She stopped in the doorway and watched him pack.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to stay at Sam’s Place until this business is finished. I think it’s safest for everyone. If Thunder gets it in his head to pull off a few more rounds, I don’t want any of you anywhere near me.”

Her eyes went cold and her voice was all frost. “You’re going after him.”

“I’m not going to just let this thing lie.” He went to the closet and pulled out a hooded sweatshirt that was hanging on a hook.

“You won’t be happy until one of you is dead, is that it?”

“There’s no way I can make you understand, Jo. I’m not even going to try. This is just the way it’s going to be.”

“Goddamn you, Cork.” She said it quietly so that Stevie, in his bed down the hall, wouldn’t hear.

He snapped the suitcase closed.

“What do I tell him?” she said.

“Tell him I’m squaring off with a bully.”

“This bully has a rifle.”

“With bullies there’s always something to be afraid of.”

She went to him and put her hand on his arm, as if to restrain him. “You were all set to step away from this.”

“Thunder changed my mind.”

“And I can’t change it back.” She dropped her hand. “This is so fucking macho stupid.”

“Lock the doors,” he said, and moved past her.

He took his .38 police special from the lockbox in the closet and pulled the gun belt with the basket-weave holster from the shelf. He went to the basement and from the locked cabinet took his Remington and cartridges for both firearms. Upstairs, Jo stood in the kitchen, near the back door.

“Cork, please don’t go. Please just let Marsha and Ed and their people handle this.”

“Their people don’t know the rez. Nobody on the rez will talk to their people. You know that.” He understood her fear, he really did. He wished she understood him. He tried one more time. “Jo, can’t you feel it? It’s like we’re standing on an ocean shore watching a tidal wave come at us. Something big and awful is taking shape and it’s going to hit this county and everyone in it. I can’t just stand by and let that happen.”

“You’re exaggerating, Cork.”

“Am I? Two people have been brutally murdered already. The Red Boyz aren’t going to let that slide. Buck Reinhardt wants Lonnie Thunder dead, and to make that happen he’s probably more than willing to go through all the Red Boyz and anyone else who stands in his way.”

“Including you.”

“It doesn’t have to come to that.”

“But it could,” she said.

“Not if I find Thunder.”

“This argument feels hopelessly circular. And I know I’m not going to convince you, so just go.”

“About Stevie tomorrow—”

“I’ll take care of Stevie. Just go.” She put a hand on his chest and gave him a light shove toward the door.

Now he felt pushed out, which didn’t sit well with him. But leaving was what he’d wanted, right? Even so, he hesitated, trying to think of something reasonable to say, something that would relax the tension between them. Jo just stood there and stared at him, resigned and unhappy, and finally he simply turned and left.

All the way to Sam’s Place, Cork felt a vague unsatisfactory anger. At himself, at Jo, at all the stupid people who’d done stupid things lately and all those who were poised on the brink of doing still more stupid things. He pulled into the parking lot and stopped in almost the exact spot where he’d been when the shots were fired. He sat gazing at the old Quonset hut, which was a dull gray in the dim light from the gibbous moon visible behind high, thin clouds, and he couldn’t help feeling that Jo was right. He’d abandoned his family. Again.

He had no idea if what he was doing was the right thing. It had felt right at first, but now he was uncertain. Maybe if Jo had sent him off with hugs and kisses and encouragement, that would have made the difference. Or maybe it was simply that her arguments were reasonable and he saw now that he was just too damn stubborn to listen.

Shit.

He climbed out of the Bronco, grabbed his suitcase and his firearms, and headed inside. Sam’s Place still smelled of the coffee he’d brewed earlier. He got sheets, a pillow, and a pillowcase from the corner cabinet where he kept such items for just such situations as this. He made up the mattress on the bunk. He stripped out of his clothes and took a pair of gray gym shorts and a clean T-shirt from the things he’d brought. He turned on the lamp that sat on the old nightstand, which he’d constructed from lacquered birch limbs. He turned out the overhead light. He turned back the covers, crawled into bed, and lay awake a long time, unable to close his eyes.
All that coffee,
he told himself. In his head, he reviewed the day, a loop tape that replayed a dozen times, never leading him anywhere certain, anywhere safe.

Finally he grabbed a book from the small selection he kept sandwiched between bookends on the nightstand. A collection of Robert Frost. He turned to one of his favorite poems and began reading:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…

I
n the days when he wore the badge, Cork had collared Ike Thunder at least once a month, usually for being drunk and disorderly or driving while intoxicated. The D and Ds he would often let ride, particularly if Ike’s offensive behavior was mostly verbal. Ike, when he got drunk, talked mean, but he seldom carried through with the threats he made. It was hard for a man missing most of an arm, most of a leg, and all of an eye to do much damage, especially someone as small as Ike. Cork often put him in a holding cell and simply let him sleep it off. The DWIs were a more serious matter, and Ike finally spent six months as a guest of the Tamarack County Jail for the repetition of that offense. It cured him of the driving, but not the drinking. Ike took to confining himself to the North Star Bar, at the southern edge of the reservation, a place he could easily bum a ride to with one of his cousins. If he couldn’t get someone to give him a lift home, Fineday, who owned the bar, would let him sleep on a cot in a corner.

Ike Thunder was a war hero, a decorated Vietnam vet who’d gone away with a young man’s fervor and come home with two Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, half a body, and a well of bitterness so deep, all the alcohol in the world couldn’t fill it up. He’d left behind a girl who loved him and who, when Ike came home so terribly damaged, swore that she loved him still. They married and had a son, Alonso. Rachel Thunder was a pretty woman, small like her husband. From early on it was clear that their son, whom everyone called Lonnie, was going to be an enormous human being, a circumstance that greatly troubled the diminutive Ike. When he was a little drunk, which was often, he would take to speculating on the true paternity of the boy. When he was roaring drunk, which was not so often back then, he would sometimes try to abuse Rachel, not a wise choice for a man with only one good eye, one good arm, and a leg made of plastic. Rachel, who’d grown up tough on the rez, had no trouble dealing with Ike, usually with the aid of a baseball bat that she kept handy and, Cork had heard, that she’d dubbed Excalibur. By the time Lonnie turned four, Rachel had had enough. She left her husband and took her son to Chisholm, where her sister lived and where she got a job working for a small trucking firm. An ice storm the day before Thanksgiving that year coated everything in silver as slippery as mercury. On her way home from work, Rachel fell on a steep slope of sidewalk, hit her head, and died from the cerebral hemorrhage that resulted. Lonnie was returned to Ike, who raised him on his disability pension and the life-insurance money he received from Rachel’s death, claiming he was doing the best he could for a boy who was probably not even his own.

Thunder lived in a small clapboard house a couple of miles south of the old mission, near the center of the rez. The house had been built by his grandfather, an excellent carpenter. Ike was good with the tools his grandfather had taught him how to use and he kept the place up. Occasionally he earned extra money custom making furniture. His product was amazingly good, but his delivery timetable was always questionable, for two reasons: It took a man with one arm a lot longer to get the project done, of course; but in addition, Ike was often too drunk to work.

The morning after the shots were fired at Sam’s Place, Cork pulled off the road and parked in the bare dirt beside Thunder’s house. It was another overcast day, with a cool wind out of the northwest. He got no answer to his knock. He walked to the shed that had been built as a garage but was now Thunder’s workshop. The door was unlocked and he stepped in. The shed had a good smell to it: the fragrance of sawdust and raw wood released at the bite of the crosscut tooth and the shave of the plane. A half-completed chest of drawers sat on the old floorboards. The wood was probably maple, the color of dark honey. The shed was neat and spoke well of the enterprise that took place there. Cork had heard that Thunder altered all his tools to accommodate the use of the prosthetic arm he wore. Still, Cork would have loved to see how the man managed his work.

Lonnie Thunder didn’t live with his father, but he did live on his father’s land. Cork followed an old rutted lane that cut between the house and the shed and led into a stand of mixed pine and aspen. The ground was hard and dry, but the lane held tracks from wide SUV tires. Lonnie Thunder drove an off-road Xterra. There hadn’t been a good rain in a long time, so Cork knew the tracks weren’t recent. After ten minutes of walking, he spotted the trailer, an old silver Airstream up on blocks. Thunder’s Xterra wasn’t there. Even so, Cork drew his .38 police special from its holster and stepped off the lane and into the trees. He circled carefully and approached from the back. He put his ear to the trailer but heard nothing. He peeked through a window where there was a crack between the curtains inside. Although mostly he saw dark, Cork could still see clearly that the place had been trashed. He crept to the door. The metal around the latch was damaged where someone had used a pry bar to pop the door open. The door was still ajar an inch. Cork eased it open farther until there was a gap wide enough for his head. He looked in, satisfied himself the trailer was empty, then stepped inside.

The television screen was shattered. Dishes were smashed. Lamps had been slammed against the walls. The mattress on the bed had been sliced to shreds. The sheriff’s people had been out here after Kristi died and had found a supply of crystal meth and the disgusting photos and videos. They’d have been thorough, but not destructive in the way of the devastation Cork saw now, which seemed to him less the result of ransacking than anger. Blind, raging anger. Destruction for destruction’s sake.

“Don’t move.”

The instruction came at his back, and Cork obeyed.

“Morning, Ike,” he said.

“What are you doing here, O’Connor?”

“Looking for Lonnie. Mind if I turn around?”

“Holster that handgun first.”

Cork put the .38 away.

“Okay, turn around,” Ike Thunder said.

Cork found himself facing the barrel of a shotgun. Ike held the stock snug against his right shoulder. The double hook at the end of his prosthetic left arm tugged at a couple of rings he’d anchored in the stock, giving him a firm grasp on the firearm.

“What are you doing here?” Thunder asked again.

“Looking for Lonnie.”

“You and everybody else.”

“Everybody else do this?”

Thunder’s eyes wandered over the destruction. “No idea who did it.”

“It wasn’t the sheriff’s people?”

He shook his head. “They didn’t leave it like this.”

“When did it happen?”

“Found it this way a couple of days ago.”

“Does Lonnie know?”

“I got no idea what that boy knows.”

“Why didn’t you report it to the sheriff’s office?”

“Think they’d care that Lonnie Thunder’s trailer’s been tore up? Hell, I figure it was Buck Reinhardt, come looking for Lonnie, sending him a message with all this mess.”

Cork thought the same thing. “Mind putting the shotgun down?” he said.

Thunder lowered the barrel. He stood in the doorway. Behind him, the sun broke through clouds and Thunder suddenly cast a shadow, longer than he was tall, across all the debris that littered the floor. Where the face of that shadow would have been was a broken picture frame that held a photograph of Lonnie, maybe twelve years old, grinning from ear to ear, standing beside a multiple-point buck he’d brought down. Ike stood beside him in the photo. Lonnie was already a head taller.

“Know where Lonnie is?” Cork asked.

“Haven’t seen him in a couple of weeks.”

“Would’ve been about the time Kristie Reinhardt died.”

“That’d be it.”

“You didn’t answer my question, Ike. Do you know where Lonnie is?”

“No idea.”

“Care to speculate?”

Thunder’s eyes narrowed. “What do you want with him?”

“He took a few shots at me last night. I’d like to talk to him about that.”

“Talk? Yeah, right.”

“Okay, I’d like to beat the crap out of him. Better?”

“Truer.”

“My boy was with me. He could’ve been hurt.”

Thunder’s left eye was artificial and it was fixed in a dead gaze off to the side of Cork’s face. His other eye showed just about as much emotion. “Lonnie shot but didn’t hit you? Must’ve had to be he didn’t want to. He’s a good shot.”

“He called me afterward.”

“Yeah? What’d he say?”

“Told me to quit looking for him. Told me next time he wouldn’t miss.”

“That’s more’n he’s said to me in six months.” Thunder slipped his hooks free of the rings on the shotgun and deftly scratched at the stubble along his jawline. “You were looking for him? Buck Reinhardt hire you to find him?”

“You know about Alex and Rayette Kingbird?”

“I heard about ’em. Heard Reinhardt was behind it. Hell, he’s probably the one did this.”

“It appears he’s got an alibi for the Kingbird killings.”

“Sure. He’s white and he’s rich.”

“I’d like to know where Lonnie was when those folks were gunned down.”

Thunder looked surprised, then perturbed. “You’re thinking Lonnie might’ve had a hand in that? He’s not the brightest spark from the fire, but he wouldn’t do something like that. Hell, he thought the world of Kingbird. All those Red Boyz did.”

“I’m thinking Alex was going to turn him over to the sheriff. Maybe hoping to keep the peace and take the heat off the Red Boyz.”

“They can handle the heat.”

“I’d like to talk to Lonnie about it.”

“Seems like that’s something he definitely don’t want. Lonnie don’t want something, that’s all she wrote.”

Cork made a final appraisal of the destruction. “Whoever tore this place apart, they find Lonnie, it won’t be pretty.”

“Lonnie takes care of himself.”

“I hope you’re right, Ike. Mind?” He indicated he wanted to leave.

Ike Thunder moved back and Cork exited the trailer. Thunder followed him, swinging his stiff artificial leg as they headed back to the house.

At his Bronco, Cork said, “You’ve modified all your firearms for that hook of yours?”

“Yeah.”

Cork gave it a moment, then said, “Heard you were at the Broiler last night. Heard you showed up after the shots were fired over at Sam’s Place.”

“I got no idea when Lonnie fired them shots. Len Boudreau gave me a lift into town. Helped me deliver a cedar chest to Darwin Dassel, then he dropped me at the Broiler.”

“How’d you get home?”

“He had some kind of meeting at the fire hall, picked me up after.”

“Len, huh?”

“I got work to do,” Thunder said.

“I find Lonnie, want me to say hey from you?”

“You find Lonnie, you’ll have your hands too full to be doing much of anything ’cept saving your own ass.”