"Maybe not. We could make it up to Canada. Sioux Valley. Hide out."
"Mmmm."
"What? You think we don't have a chance? We're just a couple of dead flatheads?" asked Sam.
"People who do this kind of thing… don't get away. They just don't." Aaron shrugged. "And there's always the question, Should we try?"
Sam ran a hand through his hair. "Jesus," he muttered.
"Exactly," Aaron said, with a quick, barking laugh. "If we go down… it'd make the point. Everybody knows Sitting Bull, because he died. Everybody knows Crazy Horse, because he died. Who knows about Inkpaduta? He was maybe the greatest of them all, but he went to Canada and got old and died. Not many remember him now. We're going to… war… to wake up the people. If we 'usi,»neak off, I don't think that'll be the same."
Sam shook his head but said nothing. He found another flat rock and sidearmed it at the water. It sank insttntly. "Asshole," he called after the rock.
Aaron looked down at the sandbar at his cousin, sighed and said, "I'm going back to town with you. I hear too many voices tonight. I can't handle it."
"You shouldn't come here so often. Even I can feel them, groaning under the sand." He made a brushing motion that took in the sandbar, the river and the hillside. The land around the island had once been a concentration camp. Hundreds of Sioux died in it, most of them women and children.
"Come on," Aaron said. "Let's load the truck and get our ass out of here."
Billy Hood lay on the Jersey motel bed and stared at the ceiling. He'd made a preliminary reconnaissance, across the river into Manhattan, and concluded that he could do it. He could kill the man. The stone knife weighed on his chest.
To cut a man's throat… Hood's own throat tightened. Last year, hunting out of Mille Lacs in central Minnesota, he'd taken a deer. He'd spotted it walking through a grove of birches, a tan wraith floating through the white-on-white of trees and snow. It had been a doe, but a big one. The.30-.30 had knocked it down and it hadn't gotten up again. It hadn't died, either. It had lain there on its side in the shallow snow, its feet making feeble running motions, its visible eye blinking up at him and his brother-in-law Roger.
"Better cut her throat, brother," Roger had said. Roger was smiling. Turned on? Feeling the power? "Put her out of her misery."
Hood had taken his hunting knife from its sheath, a knife he'd honed to a razor sharpness. He'd grabbed the doe by an ear and lifted its head and cut its throat with a quick, heavy slash. Blood had spurted out on the snow and the doe had kicked a few times, its eye still blinking up at him. Then the death film crossed it and the doe went.
"It's the only place you ever see red blood, you know?" Roger had said. "In the snow. You see blood out in the woods in the fall, or in the summer, it always looks black. Boy, in this snow, it sure does look red, don't it?"
Andretti's blood would look black on the beige carpet of his office. That's how far Hood had gotten on his recon run. Andretti was famous for his long hours. The hall all around his office was closing down, but his "team" stayed on the job. Andretti called it a team. A photograph on an employee bulletin board outside his office showed Andretti and his staff gathered around a cake, wearing basketball jerseys. Andretti, of course, wore number 1.
"Mother," Hood said, closing his eyes to dream and maybe to pray. The stone pressed on his chest. Andretti's blood would be black on the carpet. He would do it tomorrow, just after the hall closed.
The night was dark and filled with visions, even in the suffocating motel room. Hood woke at one o'clock, and three, four and five. At six, he got up, weary but unable to sleep. He shaved, cleaned up, put on his best suit, feeling the stone weight around his neck, the small pistol in his pocket.
He walked to the train station, caught a ride across the river, walked to Central Park. Checked the zoo and the Metropolitan Museum. Cruised the van Goghs and the Degas, lingered with the Renoirs and Monets. He liked the outdoor lushness of the Impressionists. His own country, out along the Missouri in South Dakota, was all brown and tan for most of the year. But there were times, in the spring, when you'd find small mudflats overflowing with wildflowers, where side creeks ran down to the river. He could peer at the Monets and smell the hot prairie spice of the black-eyed Susans…
It took forever for the time to come. When it did, he rode downtown on the subway, pinching out his emotions, one by one. Thinking back to his hours on Bear Butte, the arid, stoic beauty of the countryside. The distant scream of the Black Hills, raped by the whites who promoted each natural mystery with a chrome-yellow billboard.
By the time he reached the hall, he felt as close to stone as he ever had. A few minutes before five, he walked into the hall and took the stairs to the fifth floor.
Andretti's welfare department took up twelve floors of the hall, but his personal office consisted of a suite of four rooms. Hood had calculated that six to eight people regularly worked in those rooms: Andretti and his secretary; a receptionist; three aides, one male and two female; and a couple of clerks on an irregular basis. The clerks and receptionist fled at five o'clock on the dot. He shouldn't have more than five people to deal with.
On the fifth floor, Hood checked the hallway, then walked quickly down to the public rest room. He entered one of the stalls, sat down and opened his shirt. The obsidian knife hung from his neck on a deerhide thong, taken from the doe killed the year before. He pulled the thong over his neck and slipped the knife into his left jacket pocket. The gun was in his right.
Hood looked at his watch. Three minutes after five. He decided to wait a few more minutes and sat on the toilet, watching the second hand go 'round. The watch had cost twelve dollars, new. A Timex; his wife had bought it when it looked as if he might get a job with a state road crew. But the job had fallen through and all he had left was the Timex.
When the Timex said 5:07, Hood stood up, his soul now as hard as the knife. The hallway was empty. He walked quickly down to Andretti's office, looking to his right as he passed the main hall. A woman was waiting for the elevator. She glanced at him, then away. Hood continued to Andretti's office, paused with his hand on the knob, then pushed it open. The receptionist had gone, but he heard laughter from the other side of the panel behind her desk.
Putting his hand in his jacket pocket, on the gun, he stepped around the panel. Two of the aides, a man and a woman, were leaning on desks, talking. Through an open door, he could see Andretti, working in shirtsleeves behind a green goosenecked lamp. There was at least one more person in his office with him.
When he came around the panel, the woman didn't notice him for a moment, but the man saw him and frowned slightly. Then the woman turned her head and said, "I'm sorry, we're closed."
Hood took his hand from his pocket, with the gun in it, and said, "Don't say a word or make a sound. Just walk into Mr. Andretti's office."
"Oh, no," said the woman. The man clenched his fists and slipped off the desk.
Hood pointed the gun at his head and said, "I don't want to kill you, but I will. Now walk." He had now moved out of Andretti's line of sight. "Move," he said.
They moved reluctantly, toward Andretti's office. "If you do anything, if you touch a door, if you say anything, I will shoot you," Hood said quietly as they approached Andretti's office.
The man stepped inside, followed by the woman. Hood said, "Off to the side." The man said, "Boss, we've got a problem." Andretti looked up and said, "Oh, shit."
A woman was slumped in a chair in front of Andretti's desk, her face caught in a smile which seeped away when she saw Hood; Hood thought the word seeped, because of the slowness with which it left. As though she didn't want to disturb him. As though she wanted to think it was a joke.
"Where's the secretary?" Hood asked Andretti.
"She went home early," Andretti said. "Listen, my friend…"