"START triage!" Brass called.
"Right," Nick said. He was already sprinting toward the porch. He had a crime-scene kit with him, but he wished he had brought the first-aid kit from his vehicle as well. He beat Brass to the porch by a couple of steps. Aguirre, slowed by having to go for his first-aid kit, brought up the rear.
START meant Simple Triage And Rapid Treatment and had been developed for just this sort of event, when people without a lot of emergency medical training arrived at a disaster before those who did have the training and proper equipment. Nick ignored the guy who had waved them in, since he was upright and, although wounded, not critically so, and went to the closest one on his left, who was down on the ground. Brass went right.
The man Nick reached first was lying facedown, blood spreading from beneath him. Nick put a hand on his back, to let him know he was there and comfort him but also to find out if he was breathing. "You okay, buddy?"
But he didn't feel any motion beneath his hand. He moved it up to the guy's neck, feeling for a pulse. Nothing. He turned back to Aguirre, kneeling beside another victim. "You got any tape, Richie? To mark these guys?"
Aguirre fished around inside the first-aid kit and found four rolls of tape: red, black, yellow, and green. He tossed them to Nick, who tore off a long strip of black and adhered it to the dead man. Black didn't necessarily mean the person was dead, but he wasn't expected to live long enough to reach medical care, so he should be skipped over until the more urgent cases were dealt with. The highest-priority victims would be tagged with red, then yellow, and finally, those whose needs were least urgent got green.
In this way, Nick worked from victim to victim, while Brass and Aguirre did the same. Most of those he came across were alive, with wounds of varying degrees of seriousness. One had been hit in the scalp, the bullet digging a furrow just beneath the skin from forehead to crown. Another had taken two rounds to the abdomen and was bleeding like mad. He was told to put pressure on the wound and got a red tag. Another had a through-and-through that had been hit in his popliteal artery. He got a wide-cuffed tourniquet and a yellow tag.
The eleven victims were all Native Americans, most in their twenties or early thirties, Nick judged, although a couple were significantly older. They wore jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers or cowboy boots. For the most part, they wore their hair long and loose. From the glimpses Nick had of the house's interior, it was a combination home and studio – he saw a lot of lighting equipment, a good-quality video camera on a tripod, and gear boxes in what would ordinarily be a living room with bare floors and plain white walls.
"What happened here?" Brass asked as he wrapped his own belt around a man's leg as a tourniquet.
The guy with the bloody rag was the most coherent one. He dropped down into a wicker chair, its cushion already sopping with blood, not that he seemed to care at that point. "We were just sitting out here, you know, slinging the shit. These dudes pull up in a truck, slow down, and then all of a sudden they got guns out and they're blasting away at us. Couple of us were strapped, we shot back, and they rolled out."
"Can you identify them?" Brass asked.
"Never saw them before."
"What about anybody else?" Brass asked loudly. Nick recognized the commanding tone Brass could take when he wanted cooperation, and in a hurry. "Anyone able to ID the shooters?"
No one answered in the affirmative. Nick didn't believe that no one had recognized the shooters, but, as in the city, there were occasions where no one wanted to identify their assailants, preferring to mete out their own brand of justice.
"Hey," Aguirre said, "where's Meoqui?"
"Over there," someone replied, pointing to an unconscious man, crumpled on the floor, whom Nick had bandaged as best he could and tagged with red. He had been hit in the left thigh by a large-caliber round that had exploded a big chunk of his upper leg. Apparently spinning around from that wound, he took a second shot through the right trapezius, back to front, and then fell and hit the back of his head on the windowsill. He'd been bleeding badly when Nick found him. There was still hair and tissue on the corner of the sill, which Nick had observed with professional detachment. That was the sort of thing he would ordinarily be looking for, except in this case, he was more concerned with patching and tagging. This isn't your turf, he kept reminding himself. Even if you could work the scene, you don't have the authority.
Aguirre went down on one knee at the activist's side. "Meoqui, you okay?" he asked. The concern in his voice sounded authentic. Nick supposed the cop had been telling the truth. He ran short of patience with Torres but liked him in spite of that.
Torres didn't answer. Nick didn't expect him to. Best case, Torres had a concussion. Nick hoped the young man hadn't suffered any permanent brain damage, but that crack in the head was a bad one. And he'd lost plenty of blood from those bullet wounds, as well as from the scalp laceration.
His gaze ran down Torres's body. The man was short and lean, with long legs and a swimmer's build, powerful shoulders and arms revealed by his red muscle shirt. His Nikes were on the small side. Nick would have to measure to be sure, but he believed they were eight-and-a-halfs. The marks behind Domingo's house hadn't been clear enough to lift treads from, but those shoes could have made them.
Sirens wailed down the street, vehicles skidded in the din, and suddenly, the little yard and porch were overrun with cops. Nick, Brass, and Aguirre gave up what they were doing and huddled in the yard. "No EMS yet?" Brass asked.
"The closest real hospital is in the city," Aguirre said. "We've got some medical clinics and a couple of traditional healers. Nothing like a trauma center, though. Best thing for these guys will be to get them into town, but somehow the ambulances never seem to hurry real fast to get here."
"That's just wrong," Nick said.
"You don't have to tell me."
"Who was the target here?" Brass asked. "Torres?"
"Maybe," Aguirre replied. "Like I told you, he pisses a lot of people off. He makes these movies, documentaries. Last one was kind of a hit on the film-festival circuit, I guess. Even played on cable TV. It was about one of our tribal elders, a man who's had a lot of success steering reservation kids away from joining gangs by getting them interested in traditional Indian skills and practices. He teaches them the old ceremonies, you know, some of the old ways, and then they don't want to take drugs and get into trouble, because they have a connection to the land and their ancestors."
"Sounds like a great guy," Nick said.
"Yeah, he is. A real treasure. Meoqui got a lot of attention and some money because of the movie's success, and I think maybe it went to his head. The film he's working on now is about institutionalized poverty on Indian reservations. He's been traveling around, shooting on different reservations, but also shooting a lot of it here. From the stories I've heard, it's very critical of some of Chairman Domingo's policies and decisions. In return, Domingo threatened to revoke Meoqui's permission to film on the rez."
"Which could be motive for murder," Brass said. "If the revocation is still a threat and hasn't taken effect yet -"
"I don't think Meoqui's a killer."
"You didn't think Calvin Tom was, either. I don't know if you have a lot of killers on this reservation, but you've got at least one whose handiwork I can see from here."