At the top of the ridge, at a place I couldn’t seem to reach, a man was standing with his back to me, a tall man, broad, with silver hair to his waist. Independent of the conditions, he was in his shirtsleeves and stood there singing—a Cheyenne song.
I pushed off, but my boots slipped in the deep snow and I fell, finally satisfied, along with the buffalo, to just hear his song.
It was a clear night, the kind that freezes the air in your lungs with the advantage of nothing standing between your upturned face and the glittering cold of those pinpricks in the endless darkness, the wash of stars constructing the hanging road as it arced toward the Camp of the Dead.
The man had stopped singing and now half turned toward me, speaking from the side of his mouth. “You will stand and see the bad; the dead shall rise, and the blind will see.”
It was a voice I’d heard before, even though I couldn’t exactly place it. “Virgil?”
He half-turned toward me, his profile sharp, and I could see that it was not Virgil White Buffalo as he studied me from the corner of one eye. “You are bleeding?”
I looked down at the blood saturating the snow around me and the neck and chest of my sheepskin coat. “Um, yep . . . I think I am.”
He turned toward me fully and walked easily over the deep snow, kneeling and taking my face in his hands, and I could see that he had no eyes. The empty sockets looked almost as if they shot through his head like twin telescopes magnifying the black, infinite space with only a few aberrant sparks of warmth from dying stars. “Good, we can use the humidity.”
—
“I tracked the blood, and there you were, under the pile of bodies.”
I started and looked at the both of them staring holes into me—as if I didn’t already have enough extras. I watched my IVs drip and took a sip of my orange juice to gather myself until the quiet in the room became unbearable. “The two of you let me sleep away an entire day?”
My undersheriff’s voice keened with an edge. “You were shot near the external jugular alongside the sternocleidomastoid muscle in your neck—the doctor said it was a slow-bleed, but without the pressure from your coat you might’ve bled to death.”
Uncomfortably ensconced at the Custer Regional Hospital’s ICU, I picked at my robe and lifted the neckline to try and examine my bandages. I’d had a look at the results of the wound when they’d cut the sheepskin coat off me as though it were a monstrous scab. My wife and daughter had bought the jacket almost twenty-five years ago; it was one of the most treasured items in my life, and now it was lying in the bottom of some hospital dumpster. “Why did my arm stop working?”
“Blast effect to the brachial plexus that’s the nerve takeoff for your right arm, kind of like a karate chop.” Vic slapped my hand near the IVs.
“Ouch . . .”
“I hope it hurts, I hope it hurts bad enough that you never do crazy shit like this again, but you and I both know that the only kind of hurt that will do that is a good dose of death.” She stared at me, and I guess she felt a little sorry for the last statement because she added, “Speaking of which, how come you left a round in your gun?”
I glanced at Henry and shrugged, quickly developing the ability to do it with one shoulder. “We’re in Indian Country—always save the last one for yourself.”
The Cheyenne Nation nodded. “Prudent.”
I thought about telling them about Virgil and Grace Coolidge, but they thought I was crazy enough, so I let it slide. “To be honest, I think I was just worn out from pulling the trigger.” I looked back at Vic. “For the sake of the alliterative—Deke’s dead?”
“Definitively.”
“Too bad—I was really enjoying our conversation and was looking forward to talking with him some more.”
She gestured toward my arm. “And letting him shoot at you again for the privilege?”
“When we spoke, he said he was from Las Vegas.”
“Was this a long and wide-reaching conversation?”
“Long enough of one for him to shoot Roberta Payne and for me to shoot him seven times.”
She shook her head. “Well, he was from Las Vegas most recently.”
“You got a file on him?”
She glanced down at the folder in her lap. “A large one.”
“And Roberta Payne?”
She looked up at me. “Dead, and it was textbook—the twenty-two enters the skull but doesn’t have the power to escape and bounces around in there like a Mixmaster.”
I looked back at the Bear. “How’s Tavis?”
“He is fine, no damage to any internal organs.” Henry straightened his coat and grimaced. “And Emil Fredriksen wants to drag Deke out from the morgue, prop him up on the nearest snowbank, and use him for target practice.”
“And your back?”
He grunted and then squinted his eyes. “Spasms. They gave me muscle relaxers and a brace. They said to take the medication before it starts really hurting.”
“Then you should have started taking it around 1967.” I turned back to my undersheriff. “Did you talk to the casino people?”
“I did. The cocktail waitress, name tag Star, said that Willie was secretive about his personal life, but that there was a woman and maybe some other stuff; then the casino manager said that this Deke character showed up and the dynamic changed and the three of them were in there pretty much every night.”
“Roberta was never alone?”
“Never as far as they knew.”
I thought about it. “Deke said that he had taken Roberta from Willie—they all had to stay somewhere.”
The Bear leaned back in his chair and glanced at Vic. “I am assuming you obtained an address for the now-deceased croupier, Willie?”
“Yeah, he’s got, or should I say had, a crummy little house with an attic apartment.”
“You have an address?”
“I do.”
I started to pull the covers away. “Then what are we waiting for?”
The Cheyenne Nation placed a hand on my good arm. “There are four, very large, armed South Dakota highway patrolmen outside the door, who are charged with the responsibility of keeping you here until you have spoken with Special Agent Pivic of the Division of Criminal Investigation.”
Bruce Pivic held a wide and long reputation in western law enforcement from his days as a fraud investigator with the South Dakota attorney general’s office; meticulous and unrelenting, Bruce could boast of having taken down a lieutenant governor, a prosecuting attorney, and a mob boss who had attempted to launder money through an illegal cattle processing plant. I had sat in on one of Pivic’s intense debriefings and swore that before I ever had to sit through another, I would gladly pound eight-penny nails into my head.
I glanced toward the door and scratched where the IV went into my arm. “How big are the troopers?”
“Not as big as you, but they outnumber us, and I think they can call for more, if need be.”
Vic smiled. “Your hospital reputation precedes you.”
“Hell.” I sat back against my pillows and studied the two of them. “All right then, read me the Deke report.”
Vic flipped open the folder and then held her hand out, palm up, in expectation of the two bits.
“I’ll get you later.” I looked around. “Where are my pants anyway?”
She raised an eyebrow, and the tarnished gold glistened. “That’s three dollars and fifty cents you owe me.” She looked down and began reading. “Deke ‘Big Daddy’ Delgatos is originally from San Diego, California, with a long list of run-ins, run-outs, and rundowns with the law. He did a seven spot in High Desert State Prison for kicking a guy’s head in in a bar fight in Inglewood. While inside, it seems he got all giddy with the AWSFB.” She glanced at Henry. “That would be Aryan White Supremacy Founding Brotherhood, or as my fed buddies over in Gangs and Bikers like to call them, Assholes With Shit For Brains.”