Thirty-Seven

“You think he’s armed?” whispered Saunooke, who sat watching Jack from the driver’s seat.

“He’s got a Smith and Wesson .45 in a shoulder holster,” Whaley replied as Jack came toward them.

“Shouldn’t you disarm him?”

Whaley looked at the young patrolman as if he were an idiot. “He’s not going to shoot me, Saunooke. He’s after the Salola Street boys. You stay here while I go talk to him.”

Whaley left the cruiser and walked toward Jack’s truck. The dog in the front seat leaned out the window barking, snapping at him as he drew closer. Then Jack came over and patted the dog’s head. Immediately, he started trying to lick Jack’s face.

“Quite a watchdog you’ve got there,” said Whaley.

“He wasn’t until you drove up,” Jack replied. “Your siren must have scared the shit out of him too.”

Whaley shrugged. “I had to get your attention somehow.” He looked at the lump under Jack’s jacket. “You carrying?”

Jack allowed him a brief glimpse of dark brown holster just under his left arm. “Just my old pal.”

Whaley frowned. “Don’t you think you’re too old for this?’

“There’s no statute of limitations on murder, Buck—on either side of the coin. Did you find out anything about my bullet wound for real, or were you just trying to make an old man faint?”

“Nobody with their ass shot up is in any hospital around here. That made me think maybe it was just wishful thinking on your part. Then I remembered something.”

“What?”

“When I was wrangling the very reluctant Salola Street boys into giving their DNA, I found McConnell and Russell sitting right in that office, thick as thieves. I put the fear of God into them, and they complied with the DNA right quick. But a few days before that, I’d gone over to Russell’s house looking for him. His holy roller mother invited me inside. While she was yakking about how much psychological damage we’d done to her precious son, I saw a picture of her and Two Toes McCoy.”

“Janet Russell? With Two Toes?”

Whaley nodded. “Wearing robes, at some kind of retreat. She said Two Toes was a great healer—spiritual as well as physical.” He smirked. “Now I know you don’t think I’m the sharpest knife in the drawer, but if my little boy came home with a bullet in his ass and I had a real chummy relationship with an Indian healer …”

“And your little boy didn’t want to call attention to a gunshot wound,” added Jack.

“Then I might take him up to Two Toes,” Whaley finished. “Which is why I busted you with Saunooke, instead of by myself.”

Jack peered at the squad car. “Why?”

“Because Saunooke’s the only one who knows exactly where Two Toes lives.”

“And you two are going up there to check it out.”

Whaley nodded. “That’s the plan. You need to go home now, Jack. Leave it to us.”

Whaley watched as Jack Wilkins cocked his head, looking at the cruiser wistfully, as if he’d bumped into a long-ago lover who had no memory of him at all. “Take me with you,” he said softly. “Just one last time.”

“You know I … ”

“Please. It’s the last shot I’ll have at this. I don’t want to die with my life in pieces and not know why.”

Whaley looked up at the leprechaun on top of Devin McConnell’s office, mostly because he didn’t want to see the look in Jack’s eyes. He could lose his badge for involving a civilian in a police operation; yet he would have lost his badge years ago if Jack hadn’t covered for him. Jack must still be pretty damn good with a gun and though Saunooke was a good man, he was also a young man, untested in many ways. What would it hurt to have Jack with him? Nobody would ever know, unless Two Toes blew all their brains out. Then it wouldn’t matter anyway.

“Okay,” he finally said. “But this is it.”

“I know,” Jack whispered.

In the parking lot they conferred with Saunooke, who told them they’d never catch Two Toes unawares. “He’s got all these dogs,” he told Whaley. “If they’re tied up, they’ll just bark like crazy. If they’re not tied up, they’ll eat you alive.”

“We can shoot the damn dogs,” said Whaley. “What else? What’s the layout up there?”

“He’s got a trailer in a little clearing, surrounded by some teepees. I imagine that’s where he’d put somebody who was sick.”

“How many teepees?” asked Whaley.

“I saw two. There could be more.”

“Why don’t we do this,” suggested Jack. “Saunooke goes in as a decoy, sirens blaring, gets the dogs all crazy, and asks Two Toes if he’s seen McConnell or Williams.” He looked at Whaley. “You and I can sneak around and check out those teepees. If we find either one of those guys, we can bring ’em in on suspicion of criminal mischief at the Collier home.”

“That’s pretty shaky ground, Jack,” said Whaley.

“Well, it gets them cooling their heels in jail until you can drum up something better. Lucky dug up those underpants in July—now it’s almost September. I’ve seen faster DNA tests come back on dinosaurs.”

Whaley couldn’t help but laugh. “No offense Jack, but are you sure you’re up to playing commando? Run around peering in teepees?”

“Don’t worry about me.” Jack eyed Whaley’s rotund stomach. “I’ll be fine.”

So they started off, Saunooke and Whaley in the cruiser, Jack and Lucky following.

“You do know to keep your mouth shut about this, don’t you?” Whaley asked Saunooke.

“I do.”

“If it gets ugly up there, you take care of Jack. He may be old and crazy, but I don’t want anything to happen to him.”

“Yes sir.”

Saunooke drove deep into the reservation, turning where the old woman had told him weeks before. When the pavement ended, he continued down the trail of mashed-down grass that tunneled through the forest. At the end of the path, where the Right Path Retreat sign arched over the road, he stopped.

“If you want to reconnoiter those teepees on foot, you should start here,” he told Whaley. “Two Toes’s trailer is about a hundred yards that way.” He pointed to the left. “The teepees are set up around it.”

“Okay.” Whaley opened the passenger door. “Let’s switch cars. You take Jack’s truck and tell Two Toes you’re here unofficially, that you got a tip about him and the vandalism at the Collier house. It might piss him off so bad that he’ll give up Russell and McConnell. At any rate, it’ll be a good way to keep him occupied while Jack and I check things out.”

“You got it.”

Whaley and Saunooke went back to the truck and explained the plan to Jack. The old man got out of the truck, leaving Lucky with a pat on the head. As he handed his keys to Saunooke, he said, “If anything happens to me, give this dog to Mary Crow. Tell her I said to take good care of him. His name is Lucky.”

“Don’t worry about the dog, enisi. Worry about yourself.”

“Enisi?”

“Grandfather,” replied Saunooke.

Jack laughed. “Good luck to you, too, junior.”

The two older men took off through the trees while Saunooke headed toward Two Toes’s cabin. A quarter mile up the ridge they heard dogs barking wildly, as if they were within seconds of tearing something to pieces.

Wilkins just hoped it wasn’t Lucky.

They kept going in the direction Saunooke had told them, Whaley breathing hard, Wilkins feeling the climb in his bad leg. When they got to a break in the foliage, they looked down at the trailer. They had a perfect view—Saunooke had cleverly angled the truck around so that his back was to the dogs. Two Toes was facing Saunooke, unaware of them on the rise behind him. All six dogs had hushed, but they kept their eyes riveted on Two Toes. Whaley only hoped that the rope that tethered them held fast.

“Smart boy, that Saunooke, turning Two Toes away from us,” whispered Wilkins.

“He might have a future,” Whaley admitted. He scanned the perimeter of the trailer. “I count three teepees. How about you?”

“Me, too,” said Wilkins. “You want to split up or take ’em together?”

“Together. It doesn’t look like anybody’s in them, but I like backup when I’m dealing with Two Toes.”

“Lead on, then. And hurry. That Saunooke won’t be able to stall him forever.”

The teepees circled the back of the trailer, roughly fifty feet apart. Wilkins and Whaley drew their weapons as they approached the first one. Tall, straight poles were covered in white canvas painted with red symbols that could have been either stars or swastikas. Wilkins watched as Whaley crept up to the entrance and put his
ear to the tent flap. For a long moment he listened, then looked
at Wilkins and shook his head. Wilkins inched forward, slowly pulling back the tent flap. He peered inside but saw nothing except a stone-lined circle in the middle of the floor and a few blankets scattered around it.

He made a rolling motion with his right hand, their old signal for “keep going.”

Whaley headed for the second teepee. They approached it as silently as the first. Decorated with the same red squiggles, it too stood as empty—holding a fire pit and few moth-eaten blankets. The third was the same, except someone had left a crumpled pack of cigarettes in the fire pit. Jack stooped inside to retrieve them. When he crawled out, Whaley was waiting.

“I think we’ve crapped out, buddy. Nothing here but—”

Suddenly Jack shook his head, pointing over Whaley’s right shoulder. Through the trees they could see a thin plum of white smoke another twenty yards away. Immediately, they melded into their old team—Wilkins taking the lead, Whaley following. They crept up to a fourth teepee hidden in the woods. They stopped, listening for a word, a breath, a rustle from inside. Amazingly, they started to hear voices, loud and argumentative.

“Do you have to put that shit on me?” a male voice cried.

“Yes,” replied a female voice. “Two Toes says it shrinks the wound without leaving a scar.”

There was a moment of silence, then a scream of pain. “Jesus, it feels like a blowtorch! I don’t know why you think fucking Two Toes knows anything about healing.”

“You’re the one who didn’t want to go to the hospital,” the woman warned.

“I wouldn’t have needed to go to the hospital if you two had just stayed out of my damn room.”

“Somebody had to pack your things before they bulldozed the house. You sure weren’t. ”

“But did you have to bury my things under that tree? Couldn’t you have thrown them the fuck away?”

Whaley locked eyes with Wilkins. This was huge … more huge than they’d ever dreamed.

“I saw what it was! I was afraid to throw it away! If you bury a bad thing with tobacco, it can’t harm you. You throw it away and its ghost haunts you for the rest of your life.”

Whaley looked down at the ground and offered a silent prayer. Please dear God, let them say the word underwear. That’s all we need. Just one underpants and it will be all over for good.

“They were a fucking pair of girl’s panties, Mom. Panties don’t have ghosts. They weren’t going to follow anybody, anywhere.”

They grinned at each other, then moved as one, smooth as old silk. Whaley through the door first, Wilkins right behind him, both pointing their weapons. Butch Russell was lying facedown on a blanket, Janet Russell putting some kind of foul-smelling poultice on his left butt cheek. Janet Russell shrieked, terrified, as Butch started flailing his arms and legs, like a swimmer on dry land. “Nooooooooo!” he screamed. “Nooooooo!”

Whaley tossed Wilkins his handcuffs. “Congratulations, detective. You do the honors and I’ll call Saunooke.”

Trembling, Wilkins grabbed both of Russell’s arms and shackled them together at the wrist.

With his gun pointed at the terrified Janet Russell, Whaley punched the number that would connect him to Saunooke. The young officer answered a few seconds later, over a barrage of static.

“We need backup at a teepee about fifty yards behind the trailer,” he told the young man. “We have two individuals in custody.”

“What for?” asked Saunooke.

“The murder of Teresa Ewing.”