Red knife

TWENTY

In the days when he wore the badge, Cork had collared Ike Thunder at least once a month, usually for being drunk and disorderly or driving while intoxicated. The D and Ds he would often let ride, particularly if Ike’s offensive behavior was mostly verbal. Ike, when he got drunk, talked mean, but he seldom carried through with the threats he made. It was hard for a man missing most of an arm, most of a leg, and all of an eye to do much damage, especially someone as small as Ike. Cork often put him in a holding cell and simply let him sleep it off. The DWIs were a more serious matter, and Ike finally spent six months as a guest of the Tamarack County Jail for the repetition of that offense. It cured him of the driving, but not the drinking. Ike took to confining himself to the North Star Bar, at the southern edge of the reservation, a place he could easily bum a ride to with one of his cousins. If he couldn’t get someone to give him a lift home, Fineday, who owned the bar, would let him sleep on a cot in a corner.

Ike Thunder was a war hero, a decorated Vietnam vet who’d gone away with a young man’s fervor and come home with two Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, half a body, and a well of bitterness so deep, all the alcohol in the world couldn’t fill it up. He’d left behind a girl who loved him and who, when Ike came home so terribly damaged, swore that she loved him still. They married and had a son, Alonso. Rachel Thunder was a pretty woman, small like her husband. From early on it was clear that their son, whom everyone called Lonnie, was going to be an enormous human being, a circumstance that greatly troubled the diminutive Ike. When he was a little drunk, which was often, he would take to speculating on the true paternity of the boy. When he was roaring drunk, which was not so often back then, he would sometimes try to abuse Rachel, not a wise choice for a man with only one good eye, one good arm, and a leg made of plastic. Rachel, who’d grown up tough on the rez, had no trouble dealing with Ike, usually with the aid of a baseball bat that she kept handy and, Cork had heard, that she’d dubbed Excalibur. By the time Lonnie turned four, Rachel had had enough. She left her husband and took her son to Chisholm, where her sister lived and where she got a job working for a small trucking firm. An ice storm the day before Thanksgiving that year coated everything in silver as slippery as mercury. On her way home from work, Rachel fell on a steep slope of sidewalk, hit her head, and died from the cerebral hemorrhage that resulted. Lonnie was returned to Ike, who raised him on his disability pension and the life-insurance money he received from Rachel’s death, claiming he was doing the best he could for a boy who was probably not even his own.

Thunder lived in a small clapboard house a couple of miles south of the old mission, near the center of the rez. The house had been built by his grandfather, an excellent carpenter. Ike was good with the tools his grandfather had taught him how to use and he kept the place up. Occasionally he earned extra money custom making furniture. His product was amazingly good, but his delivery timetable was always questionable, for two reasons: It took a man with one arm a lot longer to get the project done, of course; but in addition, Ike was often too drunk to work.

The morning after the shots were fired at Sam’s Place, Cork pulled off the road and parked in the bare dirt beside Thunder’s house. It was another overcast day, with a cool wind out of the northwest. He got no answer to his knock. He walked to the shed that had been built as a garage but was now Thunder’s workshop. The door was unlocked and he stepped in. The shed had a good smell to it: the fragrance of sawdust and raw wood released at the bite of the crosscut tooth and the shave of the plane. A half-completed chest of drawers sat on the old floorboards. The wood was probably maple, the color of dark honey. The shed was neat and spoke well of the enterprise that took place there. Cork had heard that Thunder altered all his tools to accommodate the use of the prosthetic arm he wore. Still, Cork would have loved to see how the man managed his work.

Lonnie Thunder didn’t live with his father, but he did live on his father’s land. Cork followed an old rutted lane that cut between the house and the shed and led into a stand of mixed pine and aspen. The ground was hard and dry, but the lane held tracks from wide SUV tires. Lonnie Thunder drove an off-road Xterra. There hadn’t been a good rain in a long time, so Cork knew the tracks weren’t recent. After ten minutes of walking, he spotted the trailer, an old silver Airstream up on blocks. Thunder’s Xterra wasn’t there. Even so, Cork drew his. 38 police special from its holster and stepped off the lane and into the trees. He circled carefully and approached from the back. He put his ear to the trailer but heard nothing. He peeked through a window where there was a crack between the curtains inside. Although mostly he saw dark, Cork could still see clearly that the place had been trashed. He crept to the door. The metal around the latch was damaged where someone had used a pry bar to pop the door open. The door was still ajar an inch. Cork eased it open farther until there was a gap wide enough for his head. He looked in, satisfied himself the trailer was empty, then stepped inside.

The television screen was shattered. Dishes were smashed. Lamps had been slammed against the walls. The mattress on the bed had been sliced to shreds. The sheriff’s people had been out here after Kristi died and had found a supply of crystal meth and the disgusting photos and videos. They’d have been thorough, but not destructive in the way of the devastation Cork saw now, which seemed to him less the result of ransacking than anger. Blind, raging anger. Destruction for destruction’s sake.

“Don’t move.”

The instruction came at his back, and Cork obeyed.

“Morning, Ike,” he said.

“What are you doing here, O’Connor?”

“Looking for Lonnie. Mind if I turn around?”

“Holster that handgun first.”

Cork put the. 38 away.

“Okay, turn around,” Ike Thunder said.

Cork found himself facing the barrel of a shotgun. Ike held the stock snug against his right shoulder. The double hook at the end of his prosthetic left arm tugged at a couple of rings he’d anchored in the stock, giving him a firm grasp on the firearm.

“What are you doing here?” Thunder asked again.

“Looking for Lonnie.”

“You and everybody else.”

“Everybody else do this?”

Thunder’s eyes wandered over the destruction. “No idea who did it.”

“It wasn’t the sheriff’s people?”

He shook his head. “They didn’t leave it like this.”

“When did it happen?”

“Found it this way a couple of days ago.”

“Does Lonnie know?”

“I got no idea what that boy knows.”

“Why didn’t you report it to the sheriff’s office?”

“Think they’d care that Lonnie Thunder’s trailer’s been tore up? Hell, I figure it was Buck Reinhardt, come looking for Lonnie, sending him a message with all this mess.”

Cork thought the same thing. “Mind putting the shotgun down?” he said.

Thunder lowered the barrel. He stood in the doorway. Behind him, the sun broke through clouds and Thunder suddenly cast a shadow, longer than he was tall, across all the debris that littered the floor. Where the face of that shadow would have been was a broken picture frame that held a photograph of Lonnie, maybe twelve years old, grinning from ear to ear, standing beside a multiple-point buck he’d brought down. Ike stood beside him in the photo. Lonnie was already a head taller.

“Know where Lonnie is?” Cork asked.

“Haven’t seen him in a couple of weeks.”

“Would’ve been about the time Kristie Reinhardt died.”

“That’d be it.”

“You didn’t answer my question, Ike. Do you know where Lonnie is?”

“No idea.”

“Care to speculate?”

Thunder’s eyes narrowed. “What do you want with him?”

“He took a few shots at me last night. I’d like to talk to him about that.”

“Talk? Yeah, right.”

“Okay, I’d like to beat the crap out of him. Better?”

“Truer.”

“My boy was with me. He could’ve been hurt.”

Thunder’s left eye was artificial and it was fixed in a dead gaze off to the side of Cork’s face. His other eye showed just about as much emotion. “Lonnie shot but didn’t hit you? Must’ve had to be he didn’t want to. He’s a good shot.”

“He called me afterward.”

“Yeah? What’d he say?”

“Told me to quit looking for him. Told me next time he wouldn’t miss.”

“That’s more’n he’s said to me in six months.” Thunder slipped his hooks free of the rings on the shotgun and deftly scratched at the stubble along his jawline. “You were looking for him? Buck Reinhardt hire you to find him?”

“You know about Alex and Rayette Kingbird?”

“I heard about ’em. Heard Reinhardt was behind it. Hell, he’s probably the one did this.”

“It appears he’s got an alibi for the Kingbird killings.”

“Sure. He’s white and he’s rich.”

“I’d like to know where Lonnie was when those folks were gunned down.”

Thunder looked surprised, then perturbed. “You’re thinking Lonnie might’ve had a hand in that? He’s not the brightest spark from the fire, but he wouldn’t do something like that. Hell, he thought the world of Kingbird. All those Red Boyz did.”

“I’m thinking Alex was going to turn him over to the sheriff. Maybe hoping to keep the peace and take the heat off the Red Boyz.”

“They can handle the heat.”

“I’d like to talk to Lonnie about it.”

“Seems like that’s something he definitely don’t want. Lonnie don’t want something, that’s all she wrote.”

Cork made a final appraisal of the destruction. “Whoever tore this place apart, they find Lonnie, it won’t be pretty.”

“Lonnie takes care of himself.”

“I hope you’re right, Ike. Mind?” He indicated he wanted to leave.

Ike Thunder moved back and Cork exited the trailer. Thunder followed him, swinging his stiff artificial leg as they headed back to the house.

At his Bronco, Cork said, “You’ve modified all your firearms for that hook of yours?”

“Yeah.”

Cork gave it a moment, then said, “Heard you were at the Broiler last night. Heard you showed up after the shots were fired over at Sam’s Place.”

“I got no idea when Lonnie fired them shots. Len Boudreau gave me a lift into town. Helped me deliver a cedar chest to Darwin Dassel, then he dropped me at the Broiler.”

“How’d you get home?”

“He had some kind of meeting at the fire hall, picked me up after.”

“Len, huh?”

“I got work to do,” Thunder said.

“I find Lonnie, want me to say hey from you?”

“You find Lonnie, you’ll have your hands too full to be doing much of anything ’cept saving your own ass.”