Red Knife (25 page)

I
t was almost six thirty when Deputy Duane Pender escorted Will Kingbird into the small interview room. Kingbird sat at the table across from Cork.

“Buzz when you’re finished,” Pender said.

“Thanks, Duane.” Cork waited until Pender was gone, then said to Kingbird, “I just came back from Duluth, Will. I had a long talk with Mistress Imorg this afternoon.”

Kingbird’s face had been slack with disinterest, real or feigned, but now his whole body reacted as if electricity had just passed through it.

“You weren’t anywhere near the Buzz Saw when Buck Reinhardt was shot.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Kingbird said.

“Lucinda asked me to help.”

“I don’t want your help.”

“I was helping Lucinda.”

“Damn her! Goddamn her!”

“What did you expect? That she’d stand by and let you sacrifice your life, hers, and Uly’s?” He leaned across the table. “What are you doing, Will?”

“Stay out of this, O’Connor.”

“It’s too late.”

Kingbird slumped back in his chair and closed his eyes a moment. “Does Luci know?”

“I came straight here to talk to you first.”

“You son of a bitch,” Kingbird said in a tired voice. “You’ve got no idea what you’re doing.”

“Give me an idea, Will.”

Kingbird’s eyes were full of exhausted anger. “Know what I’ve always hated most about you, Cork? You’re always so goddamned ready to understand. You should’ve been a priest.”

“Do you want to be the one who talks to the sheriff’s people, Will, or should I go to Lucinda and she can tell them?”

“I’d love to shoot you right now, you sanctimonious son of a bitch.” Kingbird stood up, turned his back, and walked away. He stared at the wall where someone had scratched an empty heart into the oatmeal-colored paint. “You don’t understand. How could you understand?”

“I don’t need to understand.”

“I’m not a freak. I’m not a pervert.” He slammed his fist against the heart scratched on the wall.

Pender stepped in.

“It’s okay, Duane,” Cork said.

Pender considered Kingbird, nodded to Cork, and backed out.

“Will, the only thing that’s important to me is that you didn’t kill Reinhardt. Somebody’s going to tell the sheriff’s investigators, and the question is, who? That’s the initial question anyway. The next is probably why you lied in the first place.”

In the silence, he could hear Kingbird’s deep breathing and the scrape of the man’s fingernail as he traced the empty heart on the wall.

“Are you covering for someone, Will?”

Kingbird finally turned to face Cork. He spoke carefully. “It should’ve been me who killed Buck Reinhardt. I don’t know who pulled that trigger, but it should’ve been me. I waited around for the cops to do things their way. Hell, they never were going to get to the bottom of it. Then somebody—I don’t know, maybe one of the Red Boyz—acted like a man and took the bastard out. But it should’ve been me.”

“You’re trying to tell me you’re protecting someone and you don’t even know who?”

“Whoever it is, he did my duty. The only honorable thing left for me was to cover his back.”

“And to do that you’d take his punishment?”

“I’d take the responsibility. What judge or jury would go hard on a father who killed the killer of his son?”

“Big gamble, Will.”

“I’ve spent most of my life weighing the odds in life-or-death situations. I’ve come out on top so far.”

Cork shook his head. “Good luck convincing the sheriff’s people. It would be best if Jo was here when you talk to them.”

“I don’t want Luci to know any of this.”

“She won’t get the details from me. Whatever you and Jo decide about Luci is between the two of you.”

Cork was present, along with Jo, when Kingbird told his story. Cork confirmed what he knew of it from his interview in Duluth. Kingbird gave the same reason for lying that he’d given Cork earlier. When they’d exhausted their questions, Dross, Larson, and Rutledge left the room. They were gone ten minutes, and when they returned, the sheriff told Kingbird they were processing his release. In less than an hour, he was free. Cork took him home, then drove to Gooseberry Lane where his own house lay deep in the blue of twilight. Before he went inside, he used his cell phone to call George LeDuc.

Annie had already fed herself and Stevie, and both kids were watching television. When Cork walked in, Jo was in the kitchen, had a couple of cheese sandwiches ready to grill, and was opening a can of Campbell’s tomato soup. Cork took over the sandwiches while Jo saw to the soup.

“What did you think of Will’s story?” Cork asked.

She looked up from stirring. “Which part?”

“His reason for the false confession. That he felt duty bound to cover for whoever it was who’d done it.”

She shrugged. “I was more concerned with just getting him out of jail. Why? You don’t buy it?”

“Pretty thin, it seems to me. I think he was covering for someone, but not someone unknown to him.”

“Who?”

“It would have to be someone worth going to jail for. And for Will, who would that be?”

Jo thought about it. “He doesn’t seem close to anyone except his family.”

“Exactly.”

She laid the wooden spoon against the side of the soup pot and turned to Cork. “I can pretty much assure you it wasn’t Lucinda.”

“So that leaves?”

She looked at him with incredulity. “Uly? You can’t be serious.”

Cork tapped the griddle with the side of the spatula. “Just thinking logically. The kid helps Will in the shop, knows how to handle a firearm. He’s got motive. I don’t know where he was that night, but if I was Marsha Dross, that’s what I’d be finding out.”

“If they’d questioned Uly, I’d know it,” Jo said. “And if they’re thinking what you’re thinking, why haven’t they?”

“I don’t have an answer for that one. Maybe they know something I don’t.”

“I’m sure they have their secrets, Cork. As much as you’d like to think you’re still on the inside, you’re not. Besides, you’ve kept things from them, haven’t you? Everybody has their secrets.”

He flipped the sandwiches. “Do we?”

“Come on, I know you don’t tell me everything.”

“When it affects you, I do.”

“Right.”

“Do you keep things from me?” he asked.

“You have no idea what I’ve protected you from.” She smiled coyly and kissed his shoulder.

“Soup’s bubbling,” he said. “Do you think Will’s going to tell Lucinda the whole truth about the Slow Burn?”

Jo returned to stirring and was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know. I doubt it. I get the feeling that, in their marriage, truth is the exception rather than the rule. No, let me rephrase that. Disclosure is the exception. They seem to hold so much in. I don’t know what’s kept them from bursting apart.”

“I’m going back to the Kingbirds’ this evening with George LeDuc.”

“Whatever for?”

“There’s something we need to talk to Will about.”

“What would that be?”

“It’s between Will and LeDuc and me.”

“Now who’s keeping secrets?”

Cork slipped the spatula under one of the sandwiches and lifted it off the heat.

“I think the grilling is done,” he said.

Will said almost nothing to her when he walked into the house following his release. “Where’s Uly?” he asked in a surly tone.

Lucinda was in the rocker, feeding a bottle to Misty. “He’s spending the night at a friend’s house.”

“A friend? You mean the Gallagher kid.”

“They’re friends, Will.”

He whirled away, tornado dark in his mood, and headed toward the bathroom. “I’m going to shower.”

He was gone a long time, over an hour. Lucinda put Misty in the crib, then sought Will, who was sitting on the bed in their room, staring at the wall.

“Will?”

He looked up, startled.

“I want to speak with you,” she said.

He stood and turned away from her. “I’m not going to talk about it, Luci.”

“Please, Will.”

Now he spun back. “Don’t you ever go poking your nose in my business again.”

“Poking my nose? I was trying to help.”

“I don’t need your help.”

She flung open the gate to her own anger, something she almost never did. “Then what am I here for, Will? What am I even doing in your life?”

“You’re my wife.”

“And what is that? Wife. Tell me what you think I should do as your wife. Am I here to help you? Comfort you? Or just to feed you and clean up after you? What, Will? Because I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I have no idea.”

“You…you’re…,” he sputtered. His Ojibwe eyes as he stared at her were like shells over hard nuts. For a moment Lucinda was afraid that for the first time in all their years together, he was going to hit her. Instead, he looked down at the floor, and she saw all the iron go out of him. “I don’t know what to do, Luci.”

“Oh, Will, talk to me. Please.”

He lifted his face, full of desolation, and spoke barely above a whisper. “It was Uly.”

“Uly? What do you mean?”

“When you told me the Dragunov was missing, I checked the security tape. He’s there, Luci, on the tape. He’s helped me at the shop a hundred times. He knows where I keep the spare keys. He knows the code to disable the alarm. He came into the shop, took the Dragunov, and that night Reinhardt was killed. He helps me test my custom rifles. He’s an excellent shot. It was Uly, Luci. Uly killed the man he thought shot his brother.”

“And that’s why you lied? To protect Uly? You were going to take the blame?”

“We already lost Alex. I couldn’t let them take Uly, too.”

“Oh, Will, Will.” She crossed to the corner where he stood like a child lost in the dark. She took him in her arms.

“What are we going to do?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Will. We’ll figure out something.”

It was an unusual moment, delicious in a way, comforting Will, something she hadn’t done for a very long time. In her mind she cast about for a way to save her only son and wondered why she didn’t feel fear or panic or share Will’s miserable despair. Instead calm had descended and with it the absolute belief that she could find a way for them out of the dark. In that moment, she felt strong enough for all of them, all of those she loved.

The doorbell rang. Will tensed and pulled away.

“I’ll get it,” she said.

It was Cork O’Connor and with him was George LeDuc, whom she’d met at both the visitation and the funeral for Alexander and Rayette. Cork said, “Good evening, Luci. Is Will home?”

“Yes, but I think he doesn’t want to talk to anyone.”

“It’s important.”

“I’m here,” Will said at her back. He took her hand and stood beside her.

Cork said, “Could we talk out here, Will?”

“All right. Wait inside, Luci.”

He joined Cork O’Connor and George LeDuc on the porch, and Lucinda busied herself in the kitchen, making decaf coffee, thinking perhaps their visitors might stay for a few minutes after they’d talked with Will, though honestly she didn’t want them there. She didn’t want anything to break the connection she’d made with her husband. Finally Will came back in, alone.

“What did they want?” she asked.

“Nothing.” He held out his hand and said, “Come and sit with me, Luci. Just sit with me awhile on the porch.”

For a moment, she didn’t move.

“You asked me what I wanted you to do as my wife. Right now I just want you to sit with me. Would that be all right?”

They sat on the porch steps looking at the night sky, and although they didn’t talk, and the question of what to do about Uly was still before them, unanswered, there was something magnificently hopeful about staring into the dark together.

I
n the gray that preceded the Sunday dawn, they gathered at the mission, arriving in dusty pickups and SUVs. Arthur Villebrun drove up in his rusted, misfiring ’87 Impala because, he explained, his wife needed the truck to go to Eveleth for their niece’s First Communion. A couple of the men had handguns that previously they’d fired only in target practice, but most brought the rifles they used for hunting game. As day broke over the clearing, they stood next to the cemetery behind the mission, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts that George LeDuc had brought from the Mocha Moose. A few of the men smoked while they waited for the Red Boyz. No one said much. They’d greeted Will Kingbird and told him he was welcome, and though their faces gave nothing away, their eyes lingered a long time on the rifle that hung from a strap slung over Will’s shoulder, a Winchester Stealth painted in camouflage and with a powerful Leupold scope.

Tom Blessing’s black Silverado was the last vehicle to arrive. The others had come from the west, from the direction of Allouette, but Blessing drove in from the east, from the bog country. As the Silverado approached, a red dawn began to bleed into the clouds along the horizon behind it. Cork watched the pickup come across the clearing where the meadow grass stood so high that he couldn’t see the wheels, and for a brief time it looked to him as if Blessing was guiding a small ship across a dark green sea.

Red sky at morning,
he thought.

Half a dozen young men were hunkered down in the bed of the pickup, and when Blessing parked, they all stood up with their rifles in hand and stared mutely down at the older men already gathered. Blessing got out of the cab and walked to where LeDuc and Cork stood together. Blessing looked as if he’d aged lately, from the weight of many pressing concerns.

“Everyone here?��� he asked.

“We are now,” LeDuc said.

“All right then. Follow me.”

“Hold on a minute. I think something needs to be said.”

Lester Neadeau called out, “You’re already head of the tribal council, George. No need for speechifying.”

The men laughed.

LeDuc said, “I’ll keep it short.” He looked over those gathered beside the cemetery in the half-light of a day yet to break. “A lot of years ago, when I was no older than most of you Red Boyz, I fought in Korea. Dennis and Jack there, they both fought in Vietnam. Harvey served in the Gulf War. And Will Kingbird, hell, is there a continent you haven’t fought on? In these wars, in far-off places, we risked our lives for our country. The fight today is for our people and the land of our people. In the days of our grandfathers, there was ceremony before a battle. I don’t know what it was. A lot’s been lost over the years. But we haven’t lost our spirit, I can tell you that. We haven’t lost our courage. And we haven’t lost our knowledge of who we are.” He stood tall and he strode among the men, looking into the face of each one. “We are The People,” he finished and lifted his rifle above his head. “We are Anishinaabe.”

The men shouted and whooped. LeDuc turned to Blessing. “Now we’re ready. Lead the way.”

Most of the men climbed into two vehicles: LeDuc’s Ranger and Neadeau’s Blazer. Kingbird got into the Bronco with Cork. Trailing behind Blessing, who returned the way he’d come, they drove east on miles of dirt and gravel, twisting among bogs and sliding between high ridges, eating dust and chewing silently on what lay ahead.

“Where exactly is the warehouse?” Kingbird finally asked.

“On Black Duck Lake. Not a place anyone goes anymore, if they ever did. Too shallow for good fishing, not particularly picturesque or accessible. Being on the rez helps keep it isolated.”

Kingbird squinted at the red sky. “You heard of Jeb Stuart?”

“Civil War general, right?”

“One of the best the South had. Know what he said when someone asked his secret for winning a battle? Said you had to get there the firstest with the mostest. If I was this Ortega, I’d be there hours ahead of when I said I would, and I’d come well armed.”

“That’s why we’re heading out before daybreak. And the Red Boyz have been out there since yesterday, watching for just such a possibility.”

“Ortega might also be thinking seriously of not coming that way at all.”

“We thought of that. The Red Boyz have someone posted at all the important road junctions on the rez. They spot the Latin Lords, they radio that info to Blessing.”

“You thought this thing through pretty carefully,” he said.

“This is Ojibwe land. The Ojibwe know how to defend it.”

Blessing finally pulled to a stop where the access to Black Duck Lake split off. One of the Red Boyz jumped from the truck bed and dragged the blind aside. After the three vehicles had passed, he put the blind in place and bounded back into the truck. The procession continued slowly along the narrow track to the old trapper’s cabin, where once again a blind was hauled aside, exposing a faint, rugged trail that followed the shoreline east.

The warehouse had been built on a small cove at the southeast end of the lake. It was a simple rectangle about the size of a two-car garage. There were no windows and only one wide door that ascended on rollers. Camouflage netting made it difficult to see from the lake and probably impossible to spot from the air. Cork figured it wouldn’t have taken the Red Boyz much more than a weekend to put up a structure like that. It sat a dozen yards back from the lake. On the shore, two portable ten-foot aluminum docks on wheels were beached and, like the warehouse, had been covered with camouflage netting. Blessing had told them that the Tahoe the Latin Lords used whenever they visited the rez was parked inside the warehouse.

The tops of the pines that edged the water were burning with yellow sunlight as morning broke over the lake. Bobby Oakgrove, one of the Red Boyz, stood sentry in front of the warehouse. The vehicles parked along the trail and the men piled out.

“Anything?” Blessing said to Oakgrove.

“A few loons arrived for breakfast, nothing else.”

LeDuc scanned the woods around the warehouse. “Let’s get those vehicles back up the trail and out of sight. Then find yourselves a place in the trees to settle in and we’ll wait.”

Kingbird said, “And what? When they arrive we just open up on them?”

“More or less,” LeDuc said. “Unless you want to greet ’em with a handshake.”

There were a couple of quiet laughs among the men.

“I figured we’d give them a chance to talk first,” LeDuc said seriously. “Maybe we can reach an agreement.”

“The only agreement men like this accept is that you die and they don’t. This is war,” Kingbird said. “If they come, and if they’re smart, they’ll make a couple of flyovers to reconnoiter. With the sun up, any reflection off the windshields or chrome on those vehicles will give us away. We shouldn’t just move them. We should cover them with netting, if possible.”

“Do you have more netting?” LeDuc asked Blessing.

“All you need.”

“Anything else?” LeDuc said to Kingbird.

“Yes. If they have any concern that the Red Boyz might give them trouble, and again, if they’re smart, they’ll come prepared. By that I mean with men and with good weapons. I expect these people can afford both. If it was me, I’d come in with assault rifles, AK-47s or maybe XM8s. We give them a chance, they’ll simply lay down a sweeping fire that’ll cut the woods and everything in it to shreds. We’ll probably take them down eventually, if we don’t lose our cool, but a lot of us will go out with them.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” LeDuc admitted.

“And there’s another problem. They all die. I don’t think you want them all dead.”

“No?”

“My guess is that the Latin Lords would just send someone else, more men, more weapons, and next time you won’t know when they’re coming. I think there’s a way you might get everything you want and that will keep the Latin Lords away for good.”

“I’d love to hear what it is,” LeDuc said.

“It’s going to take someone familiar to them, someone with the guts to pull it off.” He scanned the gathering and his eyes settled on Blessing, the young man who’d taken the name of the war chief Waubishash.

Without hesitation, Blessing said, “What do you want me to do?”

The plane came not long after, hours before Ortega had told Blessing they would arrive. Just as Kingbird had predicted, it made several passes over the lake, almost scraping the tops of the pines that enclosed the warehouse. Cork, with his field glasses, could make out the face of the pilot and the man sitting next to him. The floatplane completed a final loop and came at the water from the north. The lake was so calm that Cork could see the reflection of the plane racing along the surface as the floats touched down. The plane taxied toward the shore. As it neared land, the passenger door opened and a man clambered out and nimbly leaped to the pontoon and from there to solid ground. He had an assault rifle slung over his shoulder.

Cork and Kingbird lay behind a hastily constructed blind of branches and brush forty yards west of the warehouse. Prone between them lay Elgin Manypenny, barely seventeen and the youngest of the Red Boyz present that day. He held a walkie-talkie in his right hand. The fingers of his left loosely gripped a nice Ruger Mark II that rested on the ground beside him. Each of the groups positioned among the trees and hidden behind blinds consisted of a mix of Red Menz and Red Boyz. Each had a designated leader and instructions, generally speaking, concerning what to do in several possible scenarios that Kingbird had talked them through. LeDuc and Blessing together had made the decisions about the makeup of the groups and chosen a radioman for each. There’d been some grumbling, but in the end every man accepted and understood his assignment. Kingbird had deployed them in such a way that there wasn’t a square foot of ground anywhere around the warehouse that was not in their field of fire, but he was also careful to place them so that they didn’t risk shooting each other. There was nowhere for the enemy to hide. The skill and efficiency with which he’d organized the operation that morning had impressed Cork and the other men. Kingbird had been given the responsibility for instituting any firing action that might be necessary, and each group awaited his command.

Cork had begun the morning still hoping that bloodshed could somehow be averted. But if what Kingbird predicted proved true—that the Latin Lords had come with men and with firepower—he knew any hope for a peaceful resolution was almost dead. With so many guns and so much tension, there was only one way for this confrontation to go and only one question in the end: Who would be left standing?

“Walking point,” Kingbird whispered, as the lone gunman moved toward the warehouse.

The man circled the structure, then studied the trees and the trail that ran along the lake toward the trapper’s shelter. Finally he walked back to the plane and signaled. The pilot cut the engine and the props ceased spinning. Another man climbed out carrying a rope, which he attached to the nose of the plane. He tossed the line to his cohort onshore, who caught it and tugged until the pontoons touched solid ground. He tied the line to an aspen sapling a dozen feet inland. From the description Blessing had supplied, Cork recognized the second man as Estevez, the enforcer. He was compact, with a head like a block of polished maple and a scar that ran diagonally from just above his left eye to his right jaw. Blessing said he’d heard it had been made by a machete.

The pilot disembarked next. This was Ortega. Blessing said that Ortega always piloted and that he claimed he could land a plane on a postage stamp. He joined the other two men on shore and they talked.

“Only three?” Kingbird whispered to Cork over Manypenny’s back. “That doesn’t feel right.”

The men walked together to the warehouse, where Ortega checked the lock.

“Give Blessing the word,” Kingbird said to Manypenny.

The young man spoke quietly into the walkie-talkie. “Now, Waubishash.”

From a distance up the trail came the diesel clatter of an engine approaching and the rattle of suspension negotiating the rough terrain. The three men at the warehouse came instantly alert. Ortega and Estevez stayed in view, but the third man slipped the assault rifle off his shoulder and disappeared behind the warehouse.

In a minute, Blessing arrived in his Silverado. He stopped twenty yards short of the warehouse and got out. He walked to the other men and they shook hands. The third man slid around the corner of the warehouse and stood behind Blessing. If Blessing was aware of the rifle at his back, he gave no sign.

Blessing spoke with Ortega and Estevez. He pointed to his watch and then to the plane and said something that made the others laugh. They talked quietly for another minute or so, then Blessing began to gesticulate fiercely and his voice rose, so that Cork could hear him.

“No. There’s no negotiation. You’re on Anishinaabe land. In Chicago, in L.A., things may be different, but here what the Anishinaabeg say goes. Here,
we
make the rules.”

In a blur of motion, Estevez had Blessing pinned to the warehouse. The sound of Blessing’s body slamming against the door exploded the stillness of the morning. Before Blessing could recover, the third man had his assault rifle inches from Blessing’s temple.

“Now?” Manypenny asked anxiously. His fingers were tight around his rifle and he gripped the radio fiercely. He held his body tense and his breathing was shallow and fast.