Shadow Prey

CHAPTER 20

In the car, Barbara looked him over.

"Why am I doing this? Driving you?"

"I'm looking for a guy," Shadow Love said. "I want you to talk to him on the telephone."

"You're not going to do anything, are you?"

"No. Just want to talk," Shadow Love said. He turned away and watched the street roll by. It took an hour of cruising and a half-dozen stops, with Barbara growing increasingly anxious, but Shadow Love finally spotted Larry Hart as he went into the Nub Inn.

"Let's find a phone," Shadow Love said. "You know what to say."

"What're you going to do?" Barbara asked.

"I want to talk to him. See what he's getting. If there's any possibility that we'll be seen, I'll call it off. You can wait out of sight down the road. If anything goes wrong and they grab me, I just won't show up and you can drive away."

"All right. Be careful, Shadow."

Shadow Love glanced at her. Her knuckles were white on the steering wheel. She knows what's coming. The pistol he'd used to kill Yellow Hand pressed into his side. His fingers touched the cold stone knife in his pocket.

Hart took the bait. Barbara called him at the Nub Inn, explained that she'd seen him go inside, and said that she had some information. But she was scared, she said. Scared of the assassins, scared of the cops. She was an old client of his, she said, and knew him by sight. She said she'd meet him by the green dumpster outside the sheet-rock warehouse by the river.

"You've got to come alone, Larry, please. The cops scare me, they'll beat me up. I trust you, Larry, but the cops scare me."

"Okay. I'll see you in ten minutes," Hart said. "And don't be scared. There's nothing to be scared of."

She looked through the glass of the phone booth toward her car. Shadow Love was slumped in the passenger seat, and she could just see the top of his head. "Okay," she said.

It took Hart fifteen minutes to get out of the inn, into his car and down to the warehouse. "There he is," Shadow Love said as Hart pulled over to the curb near the warehouse. They watched as he got out of the car, locked it, looked around and began walking cautiously toward the dumpster at the corner of the building.

"Drive around the block, like I told you. I'll look for cops," Shadow Love said.

Nothing moving on the street, nobody sitting in parked cars. Shadow Love took a breath. "Okay," he said. "Up behind the warehouse. And then you go on down where I showed you, and wait."

When they finished circling the block, they were on the back side of the warehouse. Shadow Love got out of the car. "Take care," Barbara said. "And be quick."

As she drove away, Shadow Love walked across a vacant lot littered with construction debris to the warehouse. He slipped carefully around the corner and was then directly behind the dumpster. Through a narrow space between the warehouse wall and the dumpster, he saw, for just a second, the dark sleeve of a man's coat on the other side. Hart was wearing a black jacket. Shadow Love touched the pistol under his shirt and stepped around the dumpster.

"Larry," he said. Hart jumped and spun around.

"Jesus," he said, his face stricken. "Shadow."

"It's been a long time," Shadow Love said. "I think I saw you a time or two out on Lake Street, after you graduated."

"Yeah, long time," Hart said. He tried to smile. "Are you still living around here?"

Shadow Love ignored the question. "I heard in the bars that you've been looking for me," he said, stepping closer. Hart was bigger than he was, but Shadow Love knew that Hart would be no contest in a fight. Hart knew it too.

"Yeah, yeah. The cops have. They want to talk to you about your fathers."

"My fathers? The Crows?"

"Yeah. Some people think they might, you know…" Hart bobbed his head uncomfortably.

"… have a connection with these killings?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I don't know about that," Shadow Love said. He was standing on the sides of his feet, the fingers of both his hands in his jeans pockets. "Are you a cop now, Larry?"

"No, no, I still work for the Welfare."

"You're sure talking like a cop, out on the street," Shadow Love said, pressing.

"Well, I know," Hart said. "I don't like it either. I got my clients, but the cops won't leave me alone, you know? They don't have anybody else who knows the people."

"Mmmm." Shadow Love looked down at the toes of his cowboy boots, then up at the sky. It had been slate-gray for a day and a half, but now there was a big blue hole in the clouds right over the river. "Come on, Larry. I want to talk some more. Let's go on down where we can see the river. Nice day."

"It's cold," Hart said. He shivered but walked along. Shadow Love stayed just a few inches behind him, his fingers still in his pockets.

"That's a big old hole, there," Shadow Love said, looking at the sky.

"They call it a sucker hole, pilots do," Hart said, looking up at it. "I took a couple of flying lessons once. That's what they called those things. Sucker holes."

"What do you think, that the Crows are behind all this?" Shadow Love asked.

Hart had to half turn to talk to him, and he lost his footing for a moment and stumbled. Shadow Love caught his elbow and helped him regain his balance. "Thanks," Hart said.

"The Crows?" Shadow Love prompted. They continued ' walking. j "Well, old man Andretti shipped a lot of money out here -that's the money the cops have been spreading around town-and those were the names that came up," Hart said. "The Crows.";

"How about me?"

"Well, the cops know you're their son. They thought maybe you'd know…"

"… where they are? Well, yeah. I do," Shadow Love said.

"You do?"

"Mmm." They got off the blacktopped street and walked along the grassy top of the hill that ran down to the Mississippi. Shadow Love stopped and looked down the river. The black spot floated out in front of his eyes, a funnel of darkness in the day. Fuckin' Hart, probing to find his fathers. "Love the river," he said.

"It's a hell of a river," Hart agreed. A harbor tow was pushing a single empty barge downstream toward the Ford lock and dam. The light from the sucker hole poured down on it, and from the height of the hillside, the boat and barge looked like kids' toys, every detail standing out in high relief.

"Look up there," Shadow Love said. "There's an eagle."

Hart looked up and saw the bird, but he thought maybe it was a hawk. He didn't say so but stood looking at it, aware of Shadow Love beside and slightly behind him. Shadow Love slipped his hand in his pocket and felt the knife. He'd ';• never used it before, never thought of it as a real weapon.

"Breathe it in, Larry, the cold air. God, it feels good on your skin. Breathe it in. See the eagle circling? Look at the hillside over there, Larry. Look at the trees, you can pick them all out… Breathe it in, Larry…"

Hart stood with his back to Shadow Love, his eyes half closed, taking great gulping breaths of the cold air, feeling the tingle on his skin, on the back of his neck. He turned his head up again and said, "You know, I talked…"

He was going to tell Shadow Love that he'd called the Crows from the police station, to tell them about the coming raid. But he couldn't do that. It would sound as though he were trying to ingratiate himself, as if he were crawling. Tears started down his cheeks. The cold, he thought. Just the cold.

He was taking it all in, breathing it, feeling the eagle soar, when Shadow Love put a hand on his shoulder. Hart turned his head, but the other man had stepped behind him.

"What-" Hart began to say, and then he felt the fire in his throat, a stinging, and looked stupidly at the blood on his coat, pouring like a stream onto his hands. Hart sank to his knees in wonder, then fell on his face, rolled a few feet and stopped, the eagle gone forever.

Shadow Love watched his body for a moment, then put the knife back in his jacket and looked around. Nobody.

That's two, he thought. He turned and climbed the embankment, and as he did, the TV tape of the killing of Billy Hood unrolled before his eyes, the woman cop with her pistol, blasting young Billy in the face. Lillian Rothenburg, the TV said.

He crossed the top of the hill, walked down the street, turned the corner and got in the car with Barbara.

"You okay?" Barbara asked fearfully. She looked quickly around. "See anybody around? Where's Hart?"

"Hart's gone," Shadow Love said, slumping in the passenger seat, his eyes half closed. "Saw an eagle. Great big fuckin' bald eagle, floating out over the river."

He looked away from her fear, out the window. In the reflections on the glass, he saw Lily's face, and nodded to it.

Daniel was in a dark mood. He prowled his office, peering at the political photographs that lined his walls.

"I thought we were doing good," Sloan ventured.

"So did I," said Lester. He had his loafers off and his feet hung over the side of his chair. He was wearing white sweat-socks with his blue suit.

"I can't complain," Daniel admitted. He was nose to nose with a black-and-white photo of Eugene McCarthy that dated back to the Children's Crusade of '68. McCarthy looked pleased with himself. Daniel scowled at him and counted the coups.

"One: We took out Bluebird and cleared the only killings on our turf. Two: We got Hood with Lily's help. Three: We broke the names out of Liss and damn near nailed the Crows at their apartment. That's all good."

"But?" Lily asked.

"Something's going to happen," Daniel said, turning back toward the group around his desk. "And it'll happen here. I feel it in my bones."

"Maybe the Crows'11 call it off for a while, cool out," Lucas suggested. "Maybe they'll figure that if they lie low, the heat'll die down, give them a break."

Daniel shook his head. "No. The tempo's wrong," he said. "This has been a planned progression. They kill two people to establish a philosophical basis, then Andretti to grab major headlines, then the judge and the attorney gen-eral, major federal and state law officials. The next act is going to be something big. It won't get smaller."

Anderson arrived as Daniel was talking. He took a chair and nodded to Lucas and Lily.

"Got something?" Daniel asked.

Anderson cleared his throat. "It ain't good," he said.

South Dakota authorities had located Shadow Love's driver's license. The license showed an address at Standing Rock. Standing Rock cops said he hadn't lived there for years. They had no idea where he was. The news from the National Crime Information Center was both bad and good: there was plenty of information on Shadow Love, and it was all frightening. Most of it came from California, where he'd served two years on an assault charge.

"Two years? Must have been a hell of an assault," Lily said.

"Yeah. There was a race fight outside a bar. Shadow Love took some guy down and put the boot to him. Damn near kicked him to death."

"How about here in Minnesota?" Daniel asked. "He grew up here?"

"Yeah. Went to Central. We've got Dick Danfrey over at the school board now, looking through their records. He should be getting back anytime. We're looking for addresses, friends, attorneys, anything that might make a connection."

"Is he a psycho? Shadow Love?" asked Lucas.

"The California people did a pretty thorough psychiatric evaluation on him," Anderson said, shuffling through his papers. "They're going to fax the records to us. There were indications of schizophrenia. They say he talked to invisible friends and sometimes invisible animals. And the prison shrink said the other inmates were scared of him. Even the guards. And this was in a hard-core California prison."

"Jesus," Lucas said.

"We'll have a whole file on him later this afternoon," An- derson said. "Pictures, prints, everything. Pretty recent too. Last five years, anyway."

There was nothing on the Crows. "Zilch," Anderson said.

"Nothing?"

"Well, Larry's heard of them and he knows some stuff. Mostly rumors, or legend. Nothing that would track them."

"Where is Larry?" asked Daniel, looking around.

Sloan shrugged. "He's been pretty down in the mouth since that business with the Liss kid, and us putting the money on the street."

"What the fuck, he think we're playing tic-tac-toe or something?" Daniel asked angrily.

Sloan shrugged again and Lucas asked Anderson, "What about the feebs and the fingerprints? What about the truck?"

"The FBI's still running the prints, but they say if they're old… it could take a while. The truck has different plates front and back. When we checked, the plates were supposedly lost off trucks out in South Dakota. There was no theft report, because the owners thought they'd just bounced off. So we got more prints, but no IDs."

"What you're telling us is, we've probably got them in the system, pictures and all, but we don't have any way to figure out which ones they are?" Daniel asked.

"That's about it," said Anderson. "The feebs are giving top priority to picking out the prints…"

"Maybe you could check with State Vital Records. Look for a birth certificate on Shadow Love, see who the father is, if one is listed," Lucas suggested.

"I'll do that," Anderson said. He made a note on a file cover.

"What else?" asked Daniel. The question met with silence. "Okay. Now. Something's going to happen. It's given me the creeps. We gotta get these motherfuckers. Today. Tomorrow. God damn it. And when you see Larry, tell him I want his ass in here for these meetings."

Two kids found Hart's body. They were playing on the hillside in the late-afternoon shadows when they saw him, crumpled in the weeds. For a few seconds, the older of the two thought it was a bum; but the lump was so unmoving, so awkwardly piled on itself without regard to tendon or muscle strain that even the younger one quickly realized that it must be death.

They looked at the body for a moment, then the older boy said, "We better go get your mom to call the cops."

The younger boy stuck his thumb in his mouth; it was something he hadn't done for two years. When he realized what he was doing, he pulled his thumb out and thrust his hands in his pants pockets. The older one grabbed him by the shirt and tugged him up the hillside.

The first cop on the scene was a patrolman riding single in his squad. He stepped close enough to see the blood, leaned forward to feel the cold neck and backed away. If there was evidence around the body, he didn't want to destroy it.

Two Homicide cops arrived fifteen minutes later, but nobody had yet recognized Hart.

"Throat cut," one cop said. "Could be a Crow hit. That'd be bad. Look at his clothes-decent clothes, the guy's got some bread."

The second cop, the same bespectacled investigator who'd caught the Benton murderer, eased Hart's billfold out of his hip pocket, stood up, opened it and looked at the driver's license behind the plastic window.

"Sweet bleedin' Jesus," he said aloud, his face suddenly ashen.

His partner, who was on his knees, looking at the side of Hart's head, looked up when he heard the tone of his voice. "What?"

"This is Larry Hart, the guy working with the special squad on the Indian killings."

His partner stood up and said, "Gimme the license." His voice was tight, choked. He took the license and carefully pinched a lock of Hart's hair and tugged on it, rolling the dead man's face just slightly. He compared it to the photo on the license.

"Aw, fuck," he said. "It's him."

Lily picked up the bedside phone and said hello. It was Daniel: "Lily, is Lucas there?"

"Lucas?" she said.

"Lily, don't dog me around, okay? We got big fuckin' trouble."

"Just a minute."

Lucas was in the shower. She pulled him out, and wet as a duck dog, he took the phone. "Daniel," Lily told him quietly.

"Yeah?" Lucas said.

"Larry Hart's been hit," Daniel said, his voice shaky. "He's dead. Throat cut."

"Sonofabitch," Lucas groaned.

"What?" Lily stood up. She was wearing a slip and nylons, and she watched Lucas while she groped for her dress.

"When did it happen?" he asked. As an aside to Lily he said, "Hart's been killed."

"We don't know shit," Daniel said. "A couple of kids found him on the hill above the river by the Franklin Avenue bridge, about an hour ago. He'd been dead for a while. The last time anybody talked to him was about noon. Sloan saw him down on Lake. Sloan's down there now, trying to backtrack him."

"All right, I'll get down there," Lucas said.

"Lucas, this isn't what I thought was coming. This is something else. I still think we're going to get hit big. Hart's personal and it makes me feel like shit, but something else is coming." Daniel had started quietly, but by the time he finished, his voice was rising and the words were tumbling out in anger.

"I hear you," Lucas said.

"Find it, God damn it. Stop it," Daniel roared.

In the car on the way down, Lily said, "Why did they call my room, looking for you?"

Lucas accelerated through a red light, then turned and looked at her in the dark. "Daniel knows. He probably knew five minutes after we got in bed. I told you he was smart; but he'll keep his mouth shut."

Sloan was standing at the edge of the hill, his hands in his coat pockets. A half-block away, three television trucks sat at the side of the street, their engines running, their microwave dishes pointed at the sky. A reporter and photographer from the StarTribune were sitting on the hood of their car, talking to a TV cameraman.

"Ain't this the shits?" Sloan asked when Lucas and Lily came up.

"Yeah." Lucas nodded at the reporters. "Have we put anything out yet? To the newsies?"

"Nothing, yet," Sloan said. "Daniel's calling a press conference. He's decided to release the names, by the way-the Crows and Shadow Love. He's going to ask for help and come down hard on the idea that the Crows are killing other Indians."

"People liked Hart," Lucas said.

"That's what they say," Sloan agreed.

Down the hill, under portable lights, the assistant medical examiners were lifting Hart's body onto a stretcher. "Did anybody see anything at all?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah. A woman back up the hill," Sloan said. "She's on her way downtown now, to look at Shadow Love's pictures. She saw a couple of guys walk over the hill, and then later she saw one of them getting in a car. Younger guy, skinny, wearing a fatigue jacket."

"Shadow Love," said Lucas.

"Could be. A woman was driving the car. She was real short. She could barely see over the steering wheel. She had dark hair pulled back in a bun."

"What about the car?"

"Older. No make or model. The witness never looked at the license number. She said one of the back corner windows-you know, one of those little triangle things?-had been knocked out and there was a piece of box cardboard in it. That's about it. It was green. Pale green."

"You saw Larry earlier, right?"

"Yeah. Just before noon. He said he was heading back down Lake. He was planning to hit the bars up at the top of the street. I backtracked him as far as the Nub Inn. The bartender who was on duty earlier in the day had already gone home, but I talked to him on the phone and he said Hart got a call there. He said he seemed surprised, like he couldn't figure out how anybody would know he was there. Anyway, he took the call and a couple of minutes later went running out of the place."

"Setup," said Lily.

"That's what I figure," Sloan said. "We've got a guy over, talking to the bartender, but I don't think he'll have much more to say."

"Christ, what a mess," Lucas said, running his fingers through his hair.

"My wife is going to be excreting bricks when she finds out one of our people got hit," Sloan said.

"I never heard of it before, not around here," Lucas said, shaking his head. He glanced at Lily. "You get this kind of stuff?"

"Every once in a while. Some dealers hit a cop a couple years ago, just to show they could do it."

"What happened?"

"The guys that did it… they're not with us anymore."

"Ah." Lucas nodded.

The bespectacled Homicide cop made his way up the hill, pushing his knees down with his hands as he climbed the last few feet. He was breathing heavily when he got to the top.

"How's it going, Jim?" Lucas asked.

"Not so good. Not a goddamned thing down there."

"No shell?"

"Nope. Not so far. We've worked it over pretty good. I think it was all the knife. Hell of a way to go."

"Tracks?"

"Can't find any," the Homicide cop said. "Too grassy. That long stuff is like walking on sponges. They must have come off the street, right onto it… You know, Hart had his back to the guy, the cutter. No struggle. Nothing. I wonder if it was somebody he trusted?"

"Probably held him at gunpoint, like Hood did with An-dretti," Lily said.

"Yeah, there's that," the cop said. He looked down the steep embankment. "But you'd think that he'd have tried to run or jump. One big jump down that hill, he'd be ten or fifteen feet from the shooter… but there was no sign of a jump. No place where his feet dug in. No grass stains on his pants. Nothing."

"He gave up," Lily said, looking at Lucas.

A crowd had gathered behind the reporters. Several of the onlookers were Indian, and Lily decided to mingle, hoping that someone else had seen something. While she worked the crowd, Lucas went down the block to a pay phone and called TV3. A receptionist hunted down Jennifer. "A tip," Lucas said when she came on the line.

"Is there a price?"

"Yeah. We'll get to that later."

"So what's the tip?"

"You've got some guys out by the river, working a homicide?"

"Yes. Jensen and…"

"It's Larry Hart. The Indian expert from Welfare that we brought in to help track these assassins."

"Holy shit," she said. Her voice was hushed. "Who else knows?"

"Nobody, at the moment. Daniel's calling a press conference, probably in a half-hour or so…"

"He already did, we've got people on the way."

"If you go on the air ahead of time, you've got to cover me. Don't give it to that fuckin' Kennedy, because everybody knows you guys lay off stories on each other."

"Okay, okay," she said, a touch of intensity in her voice. "What else? Cut?"

"Yeah. Just like the others. Throat cut, bled to death."

"When?"

"We don't know. This afternoon. Early afternoon, probably. He was found by a couple of kids who were playing along the hill."

"Okay. What else? Was he breaking the case? Was he close?"

"He wasn't this morning, but maybe he ran into something. We don't know. Now: Here's the price."

"Yeah?"

"We think the guy who did it is named Shadow Love.

Thirties, Sioux, skinny, tattoos on his arms. Daniel's going to release the name. Don't use it until he does, but when he does, pound it. I want Shadow Love's name on the air every ten seconds. I want you to pound on the idea that he's killing other Indians. Push Daniel for some photos-they've got good photos of him from California, and don't let them bullshit you on that. Demand the fuckin' photos. Give them as much airtime as you can. Tell the boss that if you cooperate, I feed you more exclusive stuff."

"Hammer Shadow Love," she said.

"Hard as you can," Lucas said.

Lily got nothing from the crowd. When she was done, she asked Lucas to drop her at her room: "I need some sleep, and I need to think. Alone."

Lucas nodded. "I could use some time myself."

At her door, Lily turned to him. "What the fuck are we going to do, Davenport?" she blurted, her voice low and gravelly.

"I don't know," Lucas said. He reached out and brushed a lock of dark hair away from her cheek, back over her ear. "I just can't stop with you."

"I'm having a little trouble myself," Lily said. "But I've got too much with David to make a break. I don't think I'd want to break…"

"And I don't want to lose Jen," Lucas said. "But I just can't stop with you. I'd like to take you right now…" He pushed her back into the room, and she had her arms around his neck, and they rocked together for a minute, the heat growing until she pushed him back.

"Get out of here, God damn it," she said. "I need some rest."

"All right. See you tomorrow?"

"Mmm. Not too early."

After dropping Lily off, Lucas drove back through town. Four trucks equipped with microwave dishes were clustered around the door to City Hall, black electronics cables snaking across the sidewalk into the building. On impulse, he pulled into a vacant cops-only parking spot and went inside.

The press conference was almost over. Lucas watched from the back as Daniel went through his routine. The television reporters were looking at their watches, ready to break away, while they listened to the the newspaper people ask a few final questions.

As he turned to leave, Jennifer stepped into the room and bumped him with an elbow.

"Thanks again. We were on the air an hour ago," she said quietly. "Look at Shelly…"

Shelly Breedlove, a reporter for Channel 8, was staring spitefully at them from across the room. She'd made the connection on TV3's exclusive break on Larry Hart's murder.

Jennifer smiled pleasantly back and said, "Fuck you, bitch," under her breath. To Lucas she said, "Are you on your way home?"

"Yeah."

"I've got a baby-sitter…"

Lucas slept poorly, his legs twitching, curling, uncurling. Jennifer curled against his bare back, her forehead against the nape of his neck, tears trickling down her cheeks. She could smell the perfume on him. It wasn't hers and it wasn't something he'd picked up sitting next to another woman. There'd been contact. A lot of contact. She lay awake, with the tears, and Lucas dreamed of a cold round circle of a shotgun pressed against his head, and of Larry Hart tumbling down the hillside above the Mississippi, the barges curling away, rolling down the river, their pilots unaware of the light going out on the hill above them…