“Close enough.”
She saw the uninterested look on my face and continued to study me. “You no like coffee, cowboy?”
“No, your coffee is fine.” I continued poking at Rachmaninoff with an extended forefinger. “You ever have a shitty job that you didn’t enjoy doing?” I glanced up at the tiny prostitute sitting there in the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge. “Forget I asked that.”
Mai Kim’s story was not a unique one in the rural villages of Vietnam; when she was eleven, she had been sold. She was fifteen now, and the four years of use in the world’s oldest profession had aged her like the major who had greeted me upon my arrival. Maybe it was the place; youth could not be maintained without innocence.
She blinked and folded the paper in her lap. “You no like here?”
I swiveled on the beat-up piano bench and rested the coffee cup on my knee, finally giving her my undivided attention. I could hear in the distance, but approaching, a group of Kingbees tipping their motors and flying over for a morning patrol. I’d learned that the H-34s, with their thirty-two-cylinder radial engines that sat right under the cockpit, were slower than the UH-1s but treasured for the large chunk of metal between the pilots and whoever might be shooting up at them. “It’s not that.”
She folded her arms. “What it, then?”
“Then what is it.”
“Then what is it?”
I smiled at her Wyoming accent.
Baranski and Mendoza had become irritated with my hardheaded naiveté and had begun spending more time on other investigations, leaving me with hours to sit and contemplate what I wasn’t getting done. Just as the major had intimated, the locals had quickly made me, and simply being observed talking with me had become reason for suspicion. But the hookers still talked to me; at least Mai Kim did.
I looked into the face of what seemed like the only friend I had in the place and wondered how long she’d keep talking to me if I didn’t start holding up my end. “You know about the drugs.” She nodded her head with concentration. “There was a young man who died after visiting the air base.”
“Lot of men die after visiting air base.”
I looked up at her. “This one was different.”
Henry studied the sleeping Indian.
“Different than what I know.”
“Crow?” I leaned against the counter.
He took a deep breath. “Yes, but not River or Mountain Band. He is something else.”
I pointed toward the moccasins. “The bead pattern is one I’ve never seen; it’s geometric, but not the Crow that I know.”
He knelt by the bars and examined the medicine bag and moccasins, though I noticed he touched neither, and nodded. “Kicked-in-the-Belly.”
I waited a moment. “You mind telling a heathen devil white man what that is?”
He pivoted and sat on the floor with his back to the cell, which Dog took as an invitation and joined him. “Eelalapi’io, a shunned band, one of thirteen exogamous maternal clans; fourth clan, grouped with ackya’pkawi’a, or Bad War Honors. ” I watched as he thought about it, first categorizing the information and then translating it so that it would be relatable to me linguistically and culturally. “Seventeen-twenty-seven, or thereabouts, there was a Crow war party led by Young White Buffalo that raided the Fat River country and came back with a very strange animal. This animal was as large as the elk but with rounded hooves, a long tail, and mane; it had no antlers, and the tribe was very interested in this new thing. A brave got too close to the rear of the animal and touched it. The creature struck the man as quick as lightning, knocking him to the dirt, where he rolled and clutched his midriff.”
"A horse, hence, Kicked-in-the-Belly?” I plucked the olive-drab field jacket from the top of the bag, crossed the room, and sat in the chair with my arms folded over the backrest. “It doesn’t make any sense. I mean, unless he’s got a hiding place out there that my guys couldn’t find.”
"Nothing on him” Henry continued to pet Dog.
“Just the matches, knife, photo wallet, and medicine bag, but Saizarbitoria is down there now going through the stuff in the tunnel.” I could see Henry was having the same doubts I was. “Why would he leave her lying out there where anybody could see her?”
He stopped petting Dog and playfully pulled at one of his long ears. Dog opened his eyes but nothing else. “I understand he is not a reasonable individual?”
“He’s tried to kill everybody he’s come in contact with so far, if that’s what you mean.” He nodded and, as I thought about the story, I connected it to the owner/operator of White Buffalo’s Sinclair Station up on the Rez. “Is the young White Buffalo in that story an ancestor of Brandon White Buffalo?”
“Probably.”
I glanced toward the cell. “Is Brandon related to this one?”
The Cheyenne Nation turned his head and looked at the Crow in the holding cell. “I know most of Brandon’s family. Brandon’s father is Cheyenne, but the White Buffalo are Crow, and it is possible that some of them adopted the relatives of the mother.” He shook his head and turned back to me. “I do not know this man, but I am unfamiliar with some of the Crow bands, especially Kicked-in-the-Belly.” He raised a thumb to the cell behind him. “He resembles Brandon.”
“You mean in raw tonnage?”
Henry snorted a soft response. “I can make some phone calls and check the tribal rolls.” He stayed motionless for a moment, and I knew there was more.
"What?”
“The medicine bag is warrior society—Crazy Dogs and Crooked Staff.” Dog looked up at his name, but Henry scratched behind his ears, and he settled his broad head back onto the Indian’s lap.
“Big deal?”
He nodded in a barely perceptible manner. “Great warriors. ”
I lifted the back of my hat and felt the bandaged lump. "Myself, a deputy, two HPs, and a couple of hospital orderlies can attest to that.”
“Crazy Dogs are the fifth and least structured of the warrior societies—they committed themselves to death in battle.”
I had heard of such things. “Kamikazes?”
“In a sense. The death is not to be foolish or useless; it is to be beneficial in the battle as it is fought.” He paused for a moment. “It is said that these individuals are known to become very reckless in their lifestyle.”
I nodded along with the solemnity. “And Crooked Staff?”
He took a breath and looked back at me. “Every spring the leaders of the war societies would give out four staffs to the newest members. These young men were to plant their staffs upon meeting the enemy and tie themselves to them, essentially fighting to the death. This provided a rear guard to any action and supplied further impetus to the war party to rally and come to the young warrior’s assistance.”
I unfolded my arms and tossed him the field jacket. “What do you make of that?”
He turned to one side, so as not to disturb Dog, and opened the jacket as I had. He flipped the snap-buttons back and examined them, something I hadn’t thought to do. “Scovill Manufacturing, tropical issue; no liner buttons on the inside.” He looked up. “He looks to be our age.”
“Yep.”
"Army surplus, or...” He let the sentence hang there between us.
“Or what?”
The dark hands smoothed the broad back of the thread-bare field jacket. He looked at the horned medicine shield and the words RED POWER. "Or...he is one of us.”
Henry Standing Bear didn’t mean Indian.
Santiago Saizarbitoria had had a rough morning; he hadn’t gotten beat up by the Indian like the rest of us, but he had to go through the things in the tunnel. I wasn’t sure which was worse. Saizarbitoria was the Basque contingency of our little department and my second bid to keep our median age under fifty. He’d transferred up from Rawlins where he had worked in the high-risk division of the state’s maximum-security correction facility, or what we used to call prison in the old days, and Vic had nicknamed him Sancho before they had even met. He was lowest on the proverbial totem pole here in town, so he usually worked Sundays because he had to and because he had a wife with a child upcoming and needed the overtime. He was sitting on the bench in the outer office drinking a cup of coffee and flirting with Ruby. Henry continued making his phone calls.