Hawk Moon (4 page)

People talked, laughed, belched, coughed, cursed and sang along with all the country and western songs about heartbreak and deceit. People smiled, frowned, winked, grimaced, teared up and rolled their eyes. People ate tacos, hot dogs, ham sandwiches, pizza slices and egg rolls. People wore orange shirts and green pants and red socks and yellow neckties and pink eye shadow and black eyes.

And in the course of it, the entire six-hour course, I developed a vague tolerance of, if not downright excitement about, gambling. Only when I went into the men's room to take out my bladder and slam it against the wall — after seven Diet Pepsis such drastic measures are required — did I realize what time it was. And realize what I'd done: lost $350. This was the guy who'd always put at least half his schoolboy paper-route money in the bank. Frugal, some said. Cheap was the word some others preferred. $350!

On the floor again, I made a few melancholy passes at the keno and blackjack set-ups but forced myself to withdraw as I felt my hand slipping toward my wallet. The dealers all seemed to watch me with knowing amusement. We just made another convert, their flashing dark eyes seemed to say. I say dark because most of the dealers were Indians. With the prosperity of the casino, the reservation unemployment rate had slipped from forty-two per cent to twelve per cent. Most of the jobs paid $6.50 per hour and provided some reasonably good benefits. If you went to gambling school and learned to deal blackjack or house poker, you could make even more.

I wanted out, then, a sudden animal need for the smell and feel of fresh warm Iowa air, an escape from this submarine of frantic human pleasure and small dashed dreams. On the way out, I passed a shiny red Corvette that you could buy tickets on. But the people who usually won already had shiny red Corvettes, or the money to buy them. God bless the child who's got his own.

On the night air you could smell autumn coming — the heady scent of burning leaves in the hills to the west, the clear clean smell of creek water to the east, and the slight tang of grass and apples and cornfields as the summer gently burned into fall. I stood on the edge of the back lot overlooking a deep ravine whose shadows almost entirely consumed the neon splashes of the casino.

And then I heard it, even above the country and western music. I heard it and mistook it for something else. And then I heard it again and knew just what it was.

I turned quickly, scanned the parking lot, saw nothing.

The sound came again — a fist driving deep into a man's torso. And the man exhaling pain, and maybe a little blood.

Fear is always my first response. But I was trained to deal with the fear, stay operative as it were, and so I started walking quickly up and down the parking lot.

Looking. Searching.

On the other side of a horse-trailer that smelled sweetly of hay and horseshit, I found them. Three of them, two doing the hitting, one taking the punishment.

"Hey!" I said.

And one of the men looked up.

He was big and slick — with a cute little gold chain on his fat peasant neck, fashionably ragged crew cut, and the attitude of a man who is both tough and important. When he saw me, he said, "This is our business, Sport."

"Leave him alone."

His friend hit the man again and this time the victim's face swung toward me and I saw it briefly in the lights of the parking lot.

He was Indian. White shirt. Black slacks. Nice-looking or he would be once he wiped the blood from his face. Young, too, no more than twenty-five or thereabouts. He'd been dealing blackjack while I was losing my money a little earlier.

The man hit him again.

There wasn't much I could do bare-handed. In the days of my FBI training, I'd done passing fair on self-defense, but not well enough that I could effectively take on a bruiser and his smaller but very angry friend. I did the only thing I could do. I reached inside my sports jacket and brought out my Ruger and put it directly in front of the bruiser's face.

I wanted him to be scared and reverent as all hell about the Ruger. He didn't give me the satisfaction.

"Hey, who the hell are you supposed to be, Sport?" he said.

"The Lone Ranger. Now you two walk out here with your
hands up. Just the way they do it in the movies."

By now, I'd gotten his friend's attention. He'd stopped slamming punches into the Indian's mid-section.

"He a cop?" the smaller man asked the bruiser.

"He seems to think he is," the bruiser said. "Probably a parking-lot attendant."

The friend nodded at a dazzling black Jaguar sedan. "All right if I go over there and get a rag for my knuckles? I cut them pretty badly."

"Poor baby," I said.

They weren't used to taking orders, either one of them. Even facing a gun, their body language and their sneers said that they were superior to me — whoever I happened to be and that soon enough they'd be in control again.

"Now what the hell's going on here?" I said.

"None of this is your business," the bruiser said.

"You better have a permit for that, asshole," the smaller man said. In the parking-lot lights, I could see that he was small, slender with the kind of steel carriage, premature gray hair and icy blue gaze I've always associated with successful public figures. Politicians or generals, I suppose. The funny thing was, he'd kept his blue suit coat on the entire time he'd been beating the Indian. He didn't want to set a bad example by dressing down, not even for assaulting somebody.

That's when the Indian stood up. He'd been leaning against the car, gathering himself, alternately cursing and sobbing.

Now he walked toward us, gave the bruiser a violent shove, and then pushed on toward the lights and noise of the casino.

"You stay the hell away from us, Rhodes, you understand?" the bruiser said.

A few customers spotted the Indian and gave him a wide berth. With the blood all over his face, he looked kind of spooky. He'd also be needing a new white shirt.

"I better not ever catch that bastard poking around in my business again," the bruiser said.

"Or mine," his friend added.

"Whatever he did," I said, "he didn't have that coming. Not two-on-one."

"You gonna kill us or talk us to death, Sport?" the bruiser said.

The temptation was to slam him across the jaw with the butt of my Ruger. But my training was too deeply instilled. Self-restraint was what they taught you at the FBI Academy. In some ways, all good law-enforcement principles depend on self-restraint.

I put the Ruger away. With the victim running off like that, there was no one to press charges, and no reason to call the cops.

The bruiser started for me but his friend put a hand on his arm and said, "Let's go in and find the girls."

"You better be a cop, Sport, that's all I've got to say," the bruiser said.

The friend glowered at me and then led his pal back to the casino. As they passed me they smelled of sweat and expensive after-shave.

When they were gone, I walked over to the Jag and took out my penlight and played it across the license plate. I noted the number in my pocket-sized notebook; I wasn't sure why. Maybe at some point their license-plate number would be useful.

I walked around to the front and shone my penlight across the steering column. Sometimes people adhere their car registration there. Sometimes. But not this time.

Then I checked my watch and realized it was time to pay a visit to my anonymous admirer at the police station.

M
r. Payne:

I'd appreciate it if you could meet me at the police station tonight at 8.00 PM. Concerning a case.

Officer Rhodes

T
he note had been left in an envelope angled into my motel-room door this morning. I carried it with me as I walked into the station a few minutes before eight.

There was a front desk, empty, and a hallway, dark, that led to a rear room where a two-way radio squawked and some human voices could be heard. The hall smelled of cleaning solvent and cigarette smoke.

A young chunky guy in a wrinkled khaki uniform sat in front of the two-way console. He might have been a small-town disk jockey running his own board. He had an angular face that did not hide its fleshiness very well, and the kind of haircut you got back in the early sixties before barbers had ever heard of hair-styling.

"Help you?" He didn't sound especially happy to see me. I got the sense that he might have held the playground bully franchise at a very tender age.

"I'm looking for Officer Rhodes."

An unpleasant grin. "Officer", huh?" On top of his radio console was a cup sitting on a saucer. On the edges of the saucer were two donuts. One would have looked inviting. Two looked somewhat obscene.

"Is there an Officer Rhodes?"

"Yeah. Except she doesn't get called that very often."

"What does she get called?"

Looking me over, he lost some of his confidence, unsure who I was, or how important I might be. "She supposed to be here tonight or something?"

"Eight o'clock."

He glanced at a big dusty clock on the wall. It made me think of public school and seventh grade and watching the clock on warm autumn days, ready to shoot spring-loaded from class the moment big and little hands met on 3:00.

"She's got an office down the hall. Guess you could try that. Sometimes she comes in the back door. You know how they are." Then he had some kind of vision and he said, "Hey, shit, I'll bet I know who you are!"

"Oh?" By "they," I guessed that my Officer Rhodes was likely an Indian.

"The serial-killer guy. FBI."

"Something like that."

He shook his head. "Goddamn her, anyway. Chief Gibbs told her to keep her nose out of it and now look."

His two-way console crackled into life and he bent his unpleasant face to the microphone. He started doing some fancy button-flipping with pudgy white fingers.

He glanced up longingly at the donut he'd had to put back on the saucer.

"T
hanks for coming."

"My pleasure."

"I was going to introduce myself earlier today but I was kind of embarrassed about the whole thing."

"You saved that little girl's life."

"I don't think he was going fast enough to kill her."

"Still. You jumped in."

She smiled. "I heard you talking to Clarence up there. He probably told you some stuff about me, didn't he?"

"Well . . ."

"He doesn't like Indians much." She grinned again. "In a previous life, he rode with General Custer."

Her crisp good looks and wise erotic eyes were just as
fetching as they had been this morning when she'd flung herself in the path of the car to save the little girl. She wore a white button-down shirt and a pair of designer jeans. A shiny badge was pinned to the right front pocket of her jeans. A standard police Smith & Wesson rode in a small holster attached to the side of her belt.

"I'm Cindy Rhodes. Morning Tree, if you want my Indian name."

We shook hands.

"I appreciate you coming over."

"I always follow down mysterious notes."

The lunch-room consisted of two tables that looked wobbly, a softly glowing Pepsi machine that resembled an invading alien, another machine that sold sandwiches and cookies and candy bars, and a giant-sized Hawkeye poster. Iowans in this part of the state long ago forsook God and took up the Hawkeyes. The room needed paint, ventilation and some general cheering up.

"Would you like a Pepsi?"

"You have Diet?"

She assessed me quickly, my rangy body and shaggy blond hair and the altar-boy blue eyes. Bartenders had carded me until I was nearly thirty.

"You don't need Diet."

"Precautionary measure."

"More people should think like you."

I smiled. "I hope not."

She treated me to a Diet Pepsi and then she walked over to a battered door and opened it up.

"This is where the reservation cop has her office," she said.

"They didn't spare any expense, did they?"

"Used to be a storeroom. At least I have a window. And the Chief did buy me this computer."

I had a sense of her as a little girl just then, one completely charmed by a new toy. She was lovelier than ever in that moment, all quick excitement and gleaming eyes.